YUKI KANEKO
Rut
MOAR2
mOAR 2008
11Tracks. 49mins08secs

With continued attention, what at first blush seemed a trifle meandering and indulgent, soon leaks into the subconscious owing to its untrammeled imagination, natural lucidity, and stylistic and thematic considerations and limitations.

The album is something of a homage to summertime – but the parallel is largely of a symbolic sort: tracks aren’t concerned with transcription, nor observation for that matter; they maintain, reassess, and coquettishly play around with their distance from and relation to this point of reference, this aura of summer that, though always suggested, only ever appears in fragmented, less familiar forms.

A common, silver-footed momentum is established from the outset and sustained.  Kaneko has an aptitude for sounding fresh and largely free from cliche while not appearing self-consciously outlandish.  It plummets into a series of effusive free-ranging tumbles with shunted and clanging particles and adroit, gently spilling loops of percussion and other anonymous instruments.  The instruments and dense scrum of field recordings generally play a shadowing and shading role.  They accommodate the flickering electronic particles, agitated percussively at a molecular level, in ways that set their idiosyncrasies to advantage, cast them in shifting, relatively unfamiliar lights and whet the appetite for more.  It’s thus as much an invitation to ponder as it is a journey through a particular soundpool.

This ferment of textures and quick pulses that began the work are then besieged and decanted as the album ambles on.  With all the necessity and graceful degradation of a summer as it swings into a temperate fall, the space opens up while the elements themselves are truncated.  Its this very trajectory that arrests the attention most; this swift, sure-footed sequence which reserves a place for and takes advantage of each moment of contrast and continuity and, in so doing, better enables one to view and experience each of the calligraphic gestures in full.  Almost as a rule of thumb, records which deal in such imaginary menagerie make concessions to button-pushing and narrow dynamics.  Kaneko doesn’t give an inch.  He canvasses such terrain with quiet authority, producing pieces that are febrile and precise, sharp and cleansing.

4/5

Yuki Kaneko | mOAR