AUS: After All (Flau)

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Posted on Feb 3rd 2009 11:29 pm

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Aus: After All

AUS
After All
FLAU09
Flau 2008
11 Tracks. 56mins06secs

The lines traced between After All, Yasuhiko Fukuzono’s sixth full-length effort, and his previous works are distant and intimate at once. The album is indeed leagues away from the staggering beat patterns and temperamental pulses that sparked a wealth of variation in the homemade blueprints of past recordings now arrogated to the archives.

After All is no longer predominantly instrumental, but a thoroughly vocal-based work, which raises little melodic buds from the underlying networks of piano and computer. At the same time, intimacy is shared between the two periods inasmuch as the crafty yet elegant programming remains. It hasn’t been re-elected as the works first principle, but then neither has it been extirpated or even subjugated to the now more gallant organic instrumentation. Rather, it enjoys them thoroughly. It absorbs them in a sublime, freeform constellation on Fake Five, finds a complement in them on IHI, and relishes their opposition during Lovers.

By no means does the album want for outside help. In sum, Sylvain Chauveau, Cokiyu, Andreas Berger, Lindsay Anderson (L’altra), and Craig Tattersall (The Remote Viewers, The Boats, etc) lend their aural signatures to the proceedings. Confounding expectation, the move doesn’t result in pieces careening between disparate styles. The album sidesteps the weariness that would likely befall such a feature, instead maintaining a continuity based on a certain flair for integrating emotionally compelling fragments into fairly conventional structures. In many places, Vertigo being one of them, the collaborators inclusion thus stands as a vibrant color that splashes out from within the piece and causes the others to vibrate ever so slowly. Only in the odd place does easy pastiche rear its head. In most every other way, After All is both a fine expansion and reduction of Fukuzono’s fragrant sound.

3.7/5

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