MIKO
Parades
PLOP005CD
Plop 2008
12Tracks.  46mins57secs

Beyond the surface diverseness, a deep consistency and coherence can be heard in the debut effort from Miko, an artist dwelling in Yokohama, outside Tokyo.  The pieces bear traces of someone who was willing to relinquish a certain control, to make herself the instrument and allow each self-contained event unfold according to its own internal dynamic.

Works like Kingdom and Ride On Time thus come across as much as natural processes as proper songs. The former features slow spasms of low rent keyboard noise and electronic wiggling, to which Miko adds compositional elements – sumptuous vocal harmonies, lazily strummed acoustic melodies, and dissipated cymbal and percussion sounds – that gives a bare overall structure.

This soundworld gets richer and more pressurized over the course of its duration, but then it also sinks into languid melodic continuum’s and almost epiphanic latticeworks of water-color textures and pregnant, buzzing fly atmospherics.  In whichever direction Miko heads, however, she takes very small steps; and she shows a real skill in rendering significant the miniscule contrasts and nuances of her sound.  For all their fragility and intimacy, for instance, her sounds are simultaneously hard and glistening as diamonds, and are precisely worked and carefully laid to rest in an uncluttered, expansive sound-field.

3/5

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