hamaYôko
hamaYôko 4/29 CD (E48)

“In my dream, I see sentences written on the ground
of a false desert”

hamaYôko is Yôko Higashi’s musique concrète-influenced electro-
pop project. hamaYôko 4/29, mixed and mastered by Higashi and
Lionel Marchetti, is her first solo release.

See also hamaYôko and Outposts

First edition of 300 copies
£8





Frans de Waard at Vital Weekly




Yôko Higashi and Lionel Marchetti, UFO club, Tokyo 2007
Photograph by Martin Holtkamp


If nothing else, this peculiar woman has one heck of an esoteric record
collection to draw on for ideas. This release includes a photograph of
her with microphone poised at lips, suggesting that this one is much
more of a ‘vocal’ album. Her singing and vocalising effects are something
of an acquired taste, but even so this release is starting to gel for me
much quicker than Ygun –n9– [which Mr. Pinsent also reviewed;
see hamaYôko (E52)]. She’s got a guest guitarist, Takeshi Yoshimura,
on three tracks and sampled rhythm tracks on others. She ain’t no
Peaches, though. Over the irregular rhythm patterns and alien clanging
noises generated by her sidemen and assorted devices, Higashi adds
her cold and distant atonal moaning, sometimes switching to a
crystalline pitch-perfect singing tone delivered with icy clarity. It might
help if I could understand the lyrics, all sung in Japanese, to help me
find a way into the intriguing stories suggested by titles like ‘Plastico
Night’ or ‘Galactica666’. This is genuinely far-out stuff, and much
time is needed to assimilate its perplexing and disjunctive surfaces.

Ed Pinsent in The Sound Projector


There may be an essential element of performance missing when you
put on hamaYôko 4/29. Yôko Higashi, whose project it is, is also a
choreographer and dancer, and there is something arrestingly theatrical
about both her vocal delivery and the drama of the fragmented sounds
set loose around her. Higashi strips pop melody to the bones and gives
it a dark redressing in rags of sound. Like multi-coloured shards spilling
free of a broken kaleidoscope, sub-bass drops, skeletal electronic
punctuations, autumnal piano, cello and resonant guitar fuzz all flicker
in and out of a sound field dominated by a voice that can slip in a
moment from sinister to utterly desolate. It's an openended but original
sound, a form of digital chanson with reduced vibrato. Scott Walker’s
angular diminished chords or the abrasive gloom of Nico’s The Marble
Index are possible comparisons, but the quotient of chaos here is
definitely higher.

Sam Davies in The Wire
—

This strangely enticing, sometimes annoying, more frequently fascinating
contrivance was created by Yôko Higashi, a Japanese vocalist and composer
never met before by this old babbler. Noticing the participation (on mix and
mastering) of Lionel Marchetti, whose work I respect, trust was granted.
Indeed the welcome was not what [I] expected: a deranged ‘song’ with
an electronic arrangement verging on dissonant mayhem, full of distorted
patterns and sequences. As the subsequent pieces alternate in our ears
we start to be seduced little by little, despite a few minor harsh spots and
a couple of slightly ‘constricted’ difficulties. Higashi knows what she’s
doing, though. Besides pushing her less inviting vocal utterances towards
the audience, at times causing them to long for something more, er,
heartwarming, she literally cuts and pastes hundreds of different crumbles
and snippets whose range covers drum’n’bass as heard from a distant
room, looped post-rock guitar riffage, melancho-lisergic vocalism and
repeated whirlwinds of modified electronics, often based on the deformation
of the author’s voice. It takes several tries to finally understand that this
theatrical pot-pourri does possess its own depth, and my best suggestion
could be ‘do not exaggerate with the volume at first’, because the multi-
faceted aggressiveness of 4/29 demands a toll if one approaches it à la
Frank Capra, all wonderful things and happy endings. Not so — but even
the ugly components seem to carry a special meaning in this artist’s sonic
poetry. Give her music time, and you’ll be repaid.

Massimo Ricci at Touching Extremes
—

Very strong compositions which might be more aptly called constructions,
with a strong relation to the theatrical. Over-driven rhythm box is glued
to the sound of a singing woman, suddenly switching to a telephone voice,
after which a toy synth plays an intricate melody. Something like that.
Never a dull moment, switching from the atmosphere of a 1950s porn
theatre to the delayed and reverberated twanging of guitars á la Les
Rallizes Denudes. I liked this rollercoaster from the start to the end. It has
the feel of John Zorn’s The Big Gundown but definitely with more spunk.

Jos Smolders at Earlabs
—

A collection of thirteen songs, sung and otherwise performed by Higashi,
they dwell somewhere between art rock and ritualism with the odd tinge
of cabaret here and there. I’ve never seen her perform but I understand,
and can see in a couple of videos available on You Tube (one with Lionel
Marchetti), that she incorporates drama and dance movement in her
performances and these pieces seem to fit into that conception, the vocals
especially having something of a theatric, even overwrought aspect.
Higashi embeds all this in noise trappings — static, various abstract field
recordings, drones of differing textures — but at heart, they’re songs and
not terribly attractive ones. For this listener, there was too much fence-
straddling; I’d rather have heard pure songs or not. A piece like Sarasate
comes closest to achieving a kind of warped, effective chanson but might
have done better performed ‘straight’.

Brian Olewnick at Bagatellen