Perfume
Cling Cling

According to surveys conducted by the international agency Pew Research in 2013, to the question "Do you have a favorable or unfavorable view of China?", 93% of Japanese respondents said "unfavorable" (for the record, 62% of Italians did the same), and in 2014 the situation remained essentially unchanged, dropping only two points to 91% (while Italians rose to 70%). This plebiscitary disdain among the Japanese for their neighbors has increased exponentially over the past ten years, given that in the 1980s Chinese products were very much in fashion (consider the comic Ranma 1/2) and that even in 2002 the percentage of people with an unfavorable view of China was only 42%. Beyond the discussions that might arise regarding the causes of this common sentiment, however, it is very interesting to note that in reality, to be precise, this animosity refers only to the current situation in China, and not to its pre-Mao traditions, as in Japan he is particularly hated due to being chiefly seen as the destroyer of the millenary Chinese culture which is still considered by the Japanese as the ultimate and unparalleled artistic achievement in the world.

In this perspective, it is not surprising that even a popular group (concerned with maintaining its popularity) like Perfume can afford a sinophile deviation, without the risk of appearing contradictory to its usual pure electronic path, which had reached a particularly refined level in the single Sweet Refrain and its minimal-chic video. In the new work Cling Cling, the three Perfume sing over a completely electronic base yet not devoid of bells, erhu, and all those melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic sound embellishments that identify a Chinese-tinged musical idea since Puccini's Turandot. The whole is obviously reduced to a pretext for dancing to a great dance track with a particularly high and hypnotic up-beat, ready to be performed live (in the instrumental version, the clapping is clearly heard, functioning as instructions for fans when they go to concerts). The video of Cling Cling, directed by the baroque Daisuke Shimada, in his second collaboration with Perfume after Spice, is immersed in a Chinese-tinged atmosphere somewhere between The Last Emperor, In the Mood for Love, and Piazza Vittorio in Rome, reconstructed by set designer Youhei Taneda, who had previously worked with Quentin Tarantino for Kill Bill. A~chan, Kashiyuka, and Nocchi are dressed as Chinese matrons preparing noodles and then dancing in lush garments borrowed from Chinese opera to help a young girl and her kaleidoscope: it doesn't make much sense, but the fun choreography makes up for everything. In addition to the title track, the single contains no less than three b-sides: Hold Your Hand is the theme song for a TV series and it shows, being charming and light, while Ijiwaru na hello is a little pop gem where parts of the song are tied together by musically dark interludes that effectively contrast with the particularly sunny chorus (a strategy already used in Spring of Life).

But the emblematic track of the disc, and perhaps one of the most emblematic in Perfume's entire career, is DISPLAY. The demiurge of Perfume, DJ Yasutaka Nakata, simultaneously manages two other artists: the house duo CAPSULE and the idol bubblegum pop artist Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, who transitioned from a mass phenomenon in Japan to a reference point for Western hipsters following Pitchfork reviews. In an attempt to distinguish these three names, Nakata has exaggerated the sounds: CAPSULE is increasingly trance, Kyary is becoming sillier, and for Perfume, an equilibrium is sought in technopop, this very difficult genre that in turn is a quest for balance between electronics and melody, invented by the Yellow Magic Orchestra in the 80s and fundamentally present only in Japan. Technopop reaches its zenith when it achieves the maximum level of abstraction: this was the case for Polyrhythm, possibly Perfume's most beautiful song, where the central part doesn’t follow the rest of the track and erupts into a complex polyrhythm; it was the case for the almost ten-minute hypnotic masterpiece edge; and so it was for Spending all my time and its paranoid rhythm, and for Sweet Refrain, a song in 8/8 composed of 42 identical modules of 6.85 seconds each, neatly distributed among instrumental interludes, verses, bridges, and choruses, creating a sense of circularity perfectly rendered by the clinical video, in which the camera makes five complete 360° turns, each consisting of eight modules (plus two introductory ones). DISPLAY brings this abstraction to the extreme: the track and related video were created as a 1.5-minute commercial spot for Panasonic, comprising only a seven-note interlude, a bridge, and a chorus; fans expected that the full version would be complete, but many were disappointed as the album version is nothing more than a stretched-out repetition of these same elements, lacking a final closure. But here's the point: Nakata wrote three separate and unconnected pieces bound only by rhythm, assembling them to appear unresolved. If the interlude is A, the bridge B, and the chorus C, in the spot these were arranged A-B-C, while in the full track they appear C A-B-C A-B, so that the only closure for the song, which otherwise appears incomplete, can be nothing but the start in an endless loop. Moreover, the chorus C is harmonically complete only once, halfway through the song: it is left incomplete at the start, and only in the central part does it become fulfilled in a sophisticated game of question & answer in countrapunt, so to hear it again, there's nothing left but to replay the song over and over. And it's worth it because it is perhaps among the most beautiful of Perfume’s choruses, in a crescendo of layered musical tension resolved in the delirium of the text reiterated over and over. The promotional video is no less impressive: directed by the trio's longtime collaborator Kazuaki Seki, it once again uses the multiplication of Perfume (a device also employed in Nee, Magic of Love, and Sweet Refrain), brought here to an art form with the same dance performance repeated multiple times, superimposed on each other and shown simultaneously in carved geometric shapes: an absolute masterpiece of simplicity and complexity.

Cling Cling is Perfume on a record: it's music to dance to, music to lift your spirits, music that's well thought-out, and it's pop music. All in perfect balance.