hamaYôko
Retronica CD (E61)
This is Yôko Higashi’s third hamaYôko album, the second to be
released this year. Retronica features contributions from Lionel
Marchetti and violinist Agathe Max, amongst others.
The following excerpt from Higashi and Marchetti’s performance
in London in September 2008 contains a beautiful version of
L’Affaire Tati, a track from Retronica.
See also hamaYôko and Outposts
First edition of 300 copies
£8
Photograph by Yôko Higashi, 2008
Yôko Higashi is a quite unique spirit, and listening to her halfway-
through-rags-and-riches acousmatic hotchpotches is becoming
a gratifying rendezvous on a regular basis. In Retronica, we find
ourselves surrounded by the well-dressed multidirectional anarchy
that this girl has grown us used to, full of malformed speeches and
uttered grunts, pitch-transposed atonal chanting, warped-to-death
samples, spiteful distortions and paroxysmal rhythms. But what’s
instantly noticeable by now is the enrichment of the compositional
traits of the music from a record to another, always granting
additional points in my scorecard: the nine tracks, despite the
myriads of apparently extraneous sounds (even slightly distressing
sometimes, gunshots and agonising vocal emissions belonging to
the recipe), demonstrate a preparative work that probably took
a long time before the definitive permission to publish them.
Or maybe this was all done in a couple of afternoons, who knows.
In 33 minutes of harmonic bedlam I couldn’t hit upon a weak point,
a brilliantly organised mess that ultimately privileges positivity to
annihilation. Aurally stimulating, cleverly efficient, theatrical in the
right moments, this is possibly hamaYôko’s finest outing to date.
Massimo Ricci at Temporary Fault
—
Yôko Higashi is a Butoh performer and choreographer as well
as a musician, and there’s an obvious theatricality to Retronica.
She favours creepy, dank atmospheres, with her twisted,
desperate vocalisations emerging from the disjointed sound
collages in a way that recalls a more hesitant Diamanda Galás.
Only the Casio organ doodle, ‘Kyô51’, which sounds like the
quiet sections of Velvet Underground’s ‘Murder Mystery’
refracted through a J-pop prism, is recognisably a song. The
majority of the ten short tracks are exercises in atmospheric
jump-cutting, but Higashi’s sounds (heavily treated samples,
mostly) all lean towards hackneyed spookyness, which means
the abrupt switches between sections don't carry the dramatic
weight such an approach demands. Unfortunately this results
in a potentially fascinating album turning into a marginally
interesting one.
Keith Moliné in The Wire