293: £00T, by Filastine

Filastine (USA/Indonesia/Japan)
£00T (2012)
13 tracks, 46 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

Raised in the US and living with his body in Barcelona and his headspace in the sounds and smells of the world’s every corner, sound artist and producer Filastine creates intelligent music that is as nourishing for the brain as it is for the limbs. £00T is an album based on doom-laden, glitched-out and dirty dubstep, techno and dub, and suffused with all sorts from Javanese gamelan, cumbia, Arabic string orchestras, Thai music, Gnawa and found sounds, with valuable contributions from alternative hip-hop artists Nova (from Indonesia) and ECD (from Japan).

Filastine and his collaborators use their music to get messages across – anti-capitalist, anti-consumerist, environmentalist and pan-globalist themes are all explored through lyrics, music and sound collage. Recording this album across six countries and using samples from even more, the understanding and respect that Filastine has for these many different styles and musicians allows him to patch together a work of rich and inhabited soundscapes that remain entirely uncluttered. The musical cultures that are used together in these pieces complement rather than contradict, strengthening the core message of strength in diversity and power in numbers.

Despite a menacing atmosphere and political bent, however, there is a sense of fun about it all. This is not po-faced music. This album is worldwide rave, after all; you can’t commit to such a party if you’re going to be deathly serious about it all the time. Being able to keep so many influences and important topics afloat in music that has a suitably weighty tone while still making it a proper blast to listen to marks Filastine out as an incredibly talented producer. This is one name we should be hearing about more often – spread the word!

178: The Gate, by Joji Hirota

Joji Hirota (Japan)
The Gate (1999)
9 tracks, 61 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

A performance of taiko drumming is a sight – and sound – to behold. These Japanese drums range in size from large to downright immense, and the noise they create is similarly massive, a huge intertwining thunder of weaving rhythms. It’s easy to understand why the taiko drums were once used to scare enemies before battle. Often paired with breathtaking choreography, a performance of taiko drumming is bombastic, thrilling and chest-pounding.

Joji Hirota is most well-known for his mastery of the taiko, having led his own taiko troupe across Europe since the 1980s. When I first got my hands on the only record he made for Real World Records, 1999’s The Gate, I was expecting to be assaulted by a wall of drumming power as soon as I stuck it in the machine. What actually came out of the speakers, though, was different.

The Gate is not at all like those theatrical taiko performances. The very first track is a gentle and sombre string quintet with the breathy tones of the Japanese bamboo flute, the shahkuhachi. It turns out that as well as a master drummer, Hirota is also a shahkuhachi player, singer and composer, and he stretches each of those limbs on this album.

Out of the album’s nine tracks, three are led by percussion, four are with the string quintet and two are songs backed with harps and synth strings. Despite there being quite a range of different styles on offer, then, the album works really well as a set, as each of the pieces regardless of the instruments at play, all share a connection of atmosphere. The whole album is thoughtful, sincere and slightly melancholy; not all of it is gentle, but it is all calm. Every aspect is considered and deliberate, giving it all an extremely satisfying and accomplished feel.

It’s so interesting when an artist you have put in one box in your head turns around and throws something completely different at you, and is amazing at that too. Joji Hirota is undoubtedly a world-class taiko player, but with The Gate, he proves that that is just the beginning of his musical talents.

168: The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (OST), by Joe Hisaishi

Joe Hisaishi (Japan)
The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (OST) (2013)
37 tracks, 52 minutes
Stream and download from khinsider (shhh) ∙ iTunes

Although I love Studio Ghibli’s films, I only saw Isao Takahata’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya for the first time a couple of years ago, but it’s probably my favourite film ever. It is absolutely stunning, a complete masterclass of animation, storytelling and simplicity. It is unrelentingly beautiful, the whole thing looks like an almost-finished watercolour come to life, except for when things get a little frantic and it seamlessly transitions to a chaotic charcoal sketch style. The story is rather simple, but passionately and sensitively told, based on traditional Japanese folklore, and all of that is reflected in the art style. It is a quiet, contemplative and slow film that really takes its time to ponder on the humble beauties and tragedies of nature and life. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is a nigh-on perfect film, and I encourage you all to go and watch it as soon as you can, and get blown away just like I was.

But we’re here, ostensibly, to talk about music, and specifically an album – today, the Original Soundtrack of The Tale of the Princess Kaguya. It was composed by Joe Hisaishi, who is well-known for his Studio Ghibli soundtracks, but this was his first for a Takahata film. Although his other scores have tended to focus more on standard Western classical and contemporary techniques (often including some interesting synthesisers), this one is a little different. A great score reflects the film, and that is the case here: the art style looks as if it could have been made by one artist and one brush, and so the music is entirely acoustic and usually focuses on quite intimate tones. The music is pleasantly understated and has a habit of sounding incredibly simple while being anything but. Almost the entire score is pentatonic, and there are many nods to classical Japanese musical forms such as gagaku and traditional instruments such as the koto zither and ritual bells; it even at points takes influence from Indian and Burmese music – which may sound a bit odd, but its use is completely natural in situ.

The film actually incorporates music into its plot in a couple of interesting ways. When she is young, the Princess sings folk songs with her friends in the countryside, but once she is moved to the city, she is obliged to learn the classical music of the koto. There is a real binary constructed between the two, which is especially evident in the way that the Princess performs the same piece of music in both ways: the earthy, simple but friendly tone of the folk style, and the intricate and elegant, yet resented, manner of the classical style. That can even be heard in the tonalities of each variation, with the folk version being in the major-sounding yo scale and the classical in the more complex, semitonal miyako-bushi scale. This album has the nice touch of putting them side-by-side as the closing track, entitled ‘Song of the Heavenly Maiden’.

One element of Joe Hisaishi’s genius that you will not be able to appreciate through this OST album is his masterful use of silence. He knows that not every scene needs incessant musical accompaniment, and these moments of quiet are always spot-on. When the first strains of strings come in after a long, reflective silence, it makes their impact so much more emotional and intense. I know this is a piece of writing about the album, but, you know, you wouldn’t have to listen to the album if you watched the film. Then you get to appreciate it in its full glory, sounded or otherwise. Plus, you also get to experience one of the most breathtakingly beautiful pieces of art out there. Just sayin.

157: Sacred Riverside Gathering @ Monasterio de Santa Cristina, Galicia, by Davide Salvado, Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė, David Rothenberg and Miguel Hiroshi

Davide Salvado, Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė, David Rothenberg and Miguel Hiroshi (Spain/Lithuania/USA/Japan)
Sacred Riverside Gathering @ Monasterio de Santa Cristina, Galicia (2014)
9 tracks, 53 minutes

This is another Album that is not really an album at all. It was a concert that was live streamed and – wondrous! – has been archived in full on YouTube. You can watch and listen to the entire performance there, together with some interviews and speeches, or, if you prefer, I have also turned all the musical sections into an mp3 album that you can listen to on the go. Get in touch and I’ll send you those files.

This album/video/stream or whatever you want to call it is the record of a unique musical meeting. Organised by the eco music platform Wapapura to coincide with that year’s WOMEX event, the concert was held in the beautiful 12th century Monastery of Santa Cristina along the banks of the River Sil in Galicia, Spain. In the monastery’s cave-like church, four musicians and a very small audience gathered for a one-off collaboration.

Two of the musicians come from traditional backgrounds – there’s Davide Salvado, a Galician folk singer, and Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė, a Lithuanian singer and kanklės (zither) player – and two come from the world of experimental music – David Rothenberg is a jazz clarinettist who is most well-known for his work with naturally-occurring music, most recently performing with nightingales in Berlin, and Miguel Hiroshi is a Japanese-Spanish percussionist who works with rhythms from all over the globe.

Together, the musicians take turns performing pieces from each other’s repertoire and expanding their own traditions to accommodate the particularities of their collaborators’. They take part in collective improvisation in a calm and relaxed manner; although one musician may lead a particular section, none takes a precedent over the others. In the hushed church, every smallest sound is crystal clear and reverberates around the space for a long time, meaning that the barely amplified music often plays with dynamics of quietness as opposed to the dynamics of loudness that we usually expect. In the ancient, holy surrounds, it all gives the concert a meditative, even mystical feeling, and one that is obviously shared by the audience, who click their fingers rather than clap at the end of pieces so as not to break that spell. It’s the perfect music for the perfect location.

I can only imagine what it must have felt like to experience this concert in the flesh. Although I was nearby at the time, in Santiago de Compostela, I unfortunately couldn’t go – I was working instead. It’s really great that Wapapura not only live streamed the whole event (using only solar power, no less) but continue to host it online for us all to enjoy this magnificent one-time collaborative event.

080: 6, by Soil & "PIMP" Sessions

Soil & “PIMP” Sessions (Japan)
6 (2009)
13 tracks, 58 minutes
Bandcamp • Spotify • iTunes

One thing I love about this blog is some of the juxtapositions that are thrown up by the random selection. This album and yesterday’s album are not entirely without their similarities, but their soundworlds are absolutely light-years apart.

Soil & “PIMP” Sessions approach jazz with the vigour of a thrash metal band. There isn’t actually any metal in the sound itself, but they play with such wild abandon in contrast to jazz’s usual restrained, tasteful image. They call it ‘death jazz,’ although I’d say it’s much more life-affirming than that implies. After the introductory sound collage contributed by DJ Kentaro, the album hits straight into that stride with the piece ‘Keizoku,’ which won’t half blow those cobwebs away. It’s a million miles an hour and it barely lets up for the rest of the album, and it’s all just pure jazz (maybe with hints of samba and Afrobeat thrown in).

Considering there are only five musicians in the group – trumpet, sax, piano, double bass and drums – they make so much noise, it sounds like there are about 20 of them. And all-acoustic too! A passing listen would convince you that there’s all matter of electronics going on, but nope. It’s all just air, reeds and strings.

There’s also a sixth, key element of the band. Shacho is the bandleader and ‘agitator’ – that means he’s the Bez of the group. His job isn’t musical as such (although he will bellow into a megaphone or hit a cymbal occasionally), as much as it is to just get the band and the audience as riled up as possible and create the perfect atmosphere: a near-riot. As you might imagine, as good as the album is, it just cannot compare to their live show. I’ve only seen them live once, at WOMAD in 2010, but I’m not sure I’ve stopped sweating since. Enjoy this album now – catch them live as soon as you can!

049: Le Koto de Hiromu Handa, by Hiromu Handa

Hiromu Handa (Japan)
Le Koto de Hiromu Handa (1977)
10 tracks, 39 minutes
YouTube playlist · iTunes

A while back I was asked by Songlines Magazine to contribute an entry for an article called ‘The Greatest Albums You’ve Never Heard,’ basically a collection of near-criminally unknown or underrated albums in world music. Although I eventually wrote about a different one, this album was one of the three that immediately jumped to mind.

I’d not heard of it before I saw it on the Anthems for the Nation of Luobaniya (an excellent but now sadly defunct music blog with old recordings from everywhere – in fact, you may still be able to download this album from there, I think), and in fact, I’ve not heard the artist discussed anywhere since, either. So, as you might expect, this is quite a mysterious one. I know little about them or this album in particular, but I know how it sounds and how it makes me feel. It is so evocative. When I listen, I’m transported to a world of contemplation, a tranquil lake surrounded by blossoming cherry trees in a rural Japan that has probably never existed in the romanticised way my brain has created.

Much like Toumani Diabaté and Mohammad Reza Mortazavi, who we’ve covered in the past, Hiromu Handa is much more than a master of his instrument. He plays the koto, a 13-stringed Japanese bridge-zither plucked with plectrums attached to the fingers, but his technique is unlike any other. He developed new ways of playing the instrument and even penned treatises to that effect. The way that Handa plays, with rapid melodies, chords, arpeggios, sweeping glissandi and even tapping rhythms on the strings – sometimes all at the same time – is avant garde in the world of Japanese classical tradition, yet it loses none of the music’s poignancy, subtlety, or even spaciousness. It never feels crowded or overdone. His pitch bends and minute vibratos are absolutely perfect. The result here is a completely solo album that pushes all boundaries while keeping the spirit of the traditional style at the very core of the performance.

As far as I can tell there is only one other album by Hiromu Handa, oddly enough with the exact same name as this one. I would love to get my hands on it and there is currently a copy going on Discogs, although it’s a little too expensive for me. If you like what you’ve been reading on this blog and would like to donate an album…well, here’s the link.