Sic Semper Tyrannis

Sign by Nobukazu Takemura (2001)

A Random CD Review from the Stutzman Memorial Library

Sign by Nobukazu Takemura (2001)

My Excel spreadsheet spit out #572 today and as we all know, that correlates to Nobukazu Takemura’s Sign. I don’t listen to this one very much as it is really experimental, cutting-edge digital lunacy. I believe the style most often assigned to this kind of music is “glitch.” So, I’m going to go home and give this a long lost listen so that I can speak more intelligently about it. Stand by for further communication…

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OK, so I took some time out to listen to this disc yesterday and I’m glad I did. There are only four tracks, each of them sounding significantly different from each other. The first song is called “Sign” and it’s my favorite of the bunch. It’s a little bit glitchy, but not as much as I remembered the whole album being. There is a pretty noticeable structure to this song, signposted by a simple, memorable melody and two main tonal areas. There is some singing and almost decipherable lyrics, but they are not organic in any way--heavily effected and sounding like a happy Speak and Spell singing to itself.

The next song, “Cogwheel,” is 90% digitally tweezed rhythm and 10% quiet, distant keyboard ostinato.

“Souvenir in Chicago” really seems to be the magnum opus of the album. It starts off with a five-note guitar (!) pattern that is looped and then harmonized with itself in counterpoint, (a la Steve Reich), and supported by reedy drones sounding like something like a distorted accordion. As I was listening yesterday, I thought to myself that this is some really beautiful music and I wondered how I missed it before. It’s probably because I was driving while listening to this in the past. Even world-shattering musical beauty can get shifted into background noise in the car. Anyway, two more major sections are left to this song: once the drums kick in, it sounds like a typical Tortoise song, (not surprising, since some members of Tortoise played on this track), but then the song devolves into glitchy robot noises before the final, (and most tedious) part- the sound of a Rhodes piano in “CD fast-forward mode.” You know the sound a CD makes when you fast forward while the audio is still playing? Well, that’s the sound. For probably ten minutes. (Feels like ten eternities.) I think it’s a cool effect, but only if used sparingly.

The last song is called “Meteor” and is my second favorite. It’s got more digital bleeps and bloops for rhythms and it’s as close as this album gets to conventional electronic music, with a semblance of a harmonic scheme at times and a fairly straight-forward programmed beat.

I realized while listening to this stuff that I had underrated the music. I remembered it a little differently than it actually was. It’s fairly challenging music, no doubt, blurring the line between noises and musical ideas, but that’s exactly what’s so interesting about this album. There’s much more of a balance struck between those two poles of music and noise than I remembered.

posted by Mike @ 11:04 AM