TAKUMA ITOI

quietitude

CD, karate joe

Never judge too quickly. Quick judgements are usually true, but only because they rarely ever get reassessed and thereby stand forever. On closer inspection, most of them would fall and crumble, or at least be subjected to major modification or differentiation. That said it is obvious that it would be too easy to take the sum of some facts like a Japanese electronica artist, a friendly people label like Karate Joe and a record title like “quietitude” to get to a conclusion of finely wrought, placent electronica. But that, even if it is true, is too easy. The music of Takuma Itoi is laden with a complexity and multi-textuality that belies the superficially seemingly simple and straight sounds and textures. The way he plays silence and simple electric piano chords against a variety of electronic noise sounds on “on the wind” is emotionally and theoretically and satisfying. Significantly he turns over the bitparts and elements one after the other, mixing them in various structures and re-arranging them over and over again with keen perception of details on a microscopic level. Still, the track moves along peacefully and gently as a perfect soundtrack to a pondering afternoon on an early November bank holiday. He turns that trick of opposing silence with organic sounds and with disrupting noise sounds, but all mixed into a gentle melée of complexity and soothing sweetness (but not sweet like sugar, rather sweet like friendship) more times in the course of this album.

This way Takuma Itoi is far deeper in the realms of music concrete than his peers, like fellow country-man Aoki Takamasa or like-minded electronica afficionados from Bip Hop. On the other hand his music is also way too playful and chaotically experimental to hold within the strict rules of music concrete. Like introducing a breakbeat for a tiny part of a song, though subtly mixed into the back of before breaking that song into tiny noise parts (“the third person”) and playing around with them like the metaphorical monkey in a china shop. Like persisting in a droning, ambient noise-scape that has an intriguing inner harmony that rises into a wash of noise that ends aprubtly somewhere between the gentleness of before and the brooding doom of a pending flood (“go on”). Or muting a pulsing deep-frequency-sound into a 3/4-bass-figure (actually it is a 7/8-figure but for the sake of the argument and not caring too much on technicality anyway) for the final track that is coincidentally called “waltz”. Or collecting a few sparse sounds almost incidentally put next to each other for an introduction to the record.

All in all, the title of this record refers more to its effect than to its essence. The ephemeral substance / result ratio of most electronica music reduces the input to these actually quite interesting genre (otherwise there wouldn’t be so much electronica within these pages) to background music or ambient in the worst sense of the word. “quietitude”, though possibly also received and listened to on the basis of pure backdrop or tapestry also offers a variety of deeper levels, for which the label has created the disturbingly fitting tag-line of “…soothing the space-sickness of newborn cosmonauts”; stretching the cybernautic parts of the music as well as the childlike playfulness under the roof of its gentle aesthetic. Now babies don’t listen to music the way grown-ups do. There is no intellectual re-assessment of music, no music-history to draw from and no comparative measurement. There is only a gut-reflex of like or not-like and a direct influence of the sounds to the behaviour and condition of the baby. Therefore I’d advise anybody to use Mozart’s violin concertos or Brahms for babies – because it will soothe them. Back to grown-ups and people able to buy and chose their records themselves: no matter how much think-work we put in listening to a record, music also will always work on this basic level as well. Takuma Itoi manages to peel parts of his music to this basic level without losing the overall aesthetic of modern electronica in others. And even if finally there are no important records in this genre, because its impact might just be too small on a larger scale, still this is what makes this record special.