Mattin & Taku Unami
Distributing Vulnerability to the Affective Classes

THE REVIEW

Taku: "We, Mattin, it's already been three years since we made a new album."
Mattin: "Eh... I know, Taku, but you know how it is... people are fed up with avant-garde. I wanted to make an album of just plin plin and then silence for twenty minutes with you, but I don't feel like it anymore."
Taku: "Why do we have to insist on doing avant-garde stuff? Let's make a nice synth-pop album. How hard can it be? A couple of keys... parabim parabà."
Mattin: "My God, how banal you are! And to think you Japanese are supposed to be ahead! No, no, here we need a nice album that shocks everyone. It doesn't have to be pleasant to listen to."
Taku: "Have we ever made an album that's pleasant to listen to?"
Mattin: "Stop thinking about being the perfectionist... the important thing is to create!"
Taku: "Yes, but create what? We need to hurry... O_O has threatened me. He wants to review our stuff, I told him we haven't composed anything and he called us slackers."
Mattin: "What a mess! What if we send him a blank disc? Nobody cares about John Cage anymore."
Taku: "No way! O__O won't fall for it! He reviewed 'Tower' by Sukora!"
Mattin: "That bastard!" 

It's here that the Japanese bursts into tears. Bereft of ideas as they are, they have no hope.
Until Mattin lights up and pulls out a directional microphone: "Here, check this out!"

Taku: "What the hell are you doing?"
Mattin: "Cry for an hour... I'll record you, that's our new album. Let's find a cool and long title, then we'll send it to the reviewer."
Taku: "But that's a crap idea! Why can't I just cry for two minutes."
Mattin: "Because otherwise it's not avant-garde! If you don't make a track of at least 60 minutes, you're nobody! NOBODY!"
Taku: "But do I just cry? Do we do something after that? Mix it? I don't know..."
Mattin: "Of course not. That would be traditional music, and we're cryptic."
Taku: "No, we're slackers."

After an hour:

Mattin: "Look how beautiful! While you were crying and I cried with you, I looked up our cover on Google. Doesn't it remind you of 'All The Pretty Horses' by Current 93?"
Taku: "But they'll never publish it!"
Mattin: "I'll put it up for free download."
Taku: "My God! I'm so ashamed!"
Mattin: "Come on, come on, I'll put it on my site and say it's just my work."

The next day, the album ended up on Mattin's site: an hour of two men's crying and nothing else. Of course, it was signed in Taku's name too, and this led to a deathly silence: after 2010, they recorded nothing more.

For the record: O__O still hasn't fully recovered and Mattin even bothered to upload it in .flac format to better savor the grooves of nothingness between one tear and the next.