KAITO

Special life

2LP/CD, Kompakt

Kaito does his very own brand of Minimal Techno, that is filled with warm keyboard-sounds, soft and understated dance-beats and arrangements that make them fit in any lounge that has ever been touched by easy listening and/or minimalism. Surely, he kept the promises he made on his first 12”es and will warm up your living areas if you let him.

Hiroshi Watanabe is the guy with the keyboard- and synthie-madness. I imagine him sitting in his living quarters, which are stacked to the ceiling with all kinds of equipment you might need or not need to make electronic music, listening to the slightest differences between keyboard-sounds for hours without end. I imagine him diligently searching for just the right sounds and notes to be picked into his tracks, these slightly echoing, very warm e-piano sounds and grooving dance-beats that aren’t really danceable at all. Then he stacks them into these highly arranged and beautiful warm of easy-listening-walls, which would never fit into any easy-listening-area because of the dancebeats. Kaito makes music to rock the boats in urban post-modern student-clubs that have fallen to the rise of Minimal Techno and need something to release all the tension.

I never listen to Techno. Well, that sentence isn’t true anymore, since I have used it way too often in record-reviews lately. Moreover, I realise that my tastes in electronic music are getting broader and wider, while my tastes in guitar-heavy music are narrowing down. That means a few things, some of which are very personal so I won’t tell you. One thing it means, usually, if I start to get interested into a musical-genre that I have somehow resisted for long periods for what reason ever, that is the point of time this genre starts to fade away in everyone else’s mind. To put it short: The Minimal Techno Hype is almost over, Georg Cracked bought a double-LP by Kaito. Well, I also bought the 12”es “Beautiful Day” and “Everlasting” and liked them, so what… Kaito does something that makes it easy to fall into his grooves, keyboard-arrangements and traps. Even though some of the tracks on here, such as “release your body” or “breaking the star” are somewhat to straightly techno with the working kickdrum pounding through the tracks, but ever since I have treated myself to the littlebrutalravebastards there is nothing that can shock me in this respect (even if my wife gives me strange looks now and then. Though she likes that better than me turning up Napalm Death or Hellnation at 7 a.m.)

If there is one thing missing on “special life” it is the error, the mistake. Kaito works hard on making his tracks perfect and with all the electronic equipment, computers and mastering software it is easy to spot glitches and little mistakes, but to me these little things make music much more lively. So “special life” tends to draw itself into the background, where it provides a beautiful and warm surrounding to live through one hour of doing something else. Now I don’t know if Kaito wants something more, or if that would already please him, but I’d like something more. Something else that hit me, is that the songtitles such as “respect to the distance” or “awakening” might hint at some esoteric, Asian-philosophic tendency in Kaito’s approach, but his music is strictly western and urban. No two ways about it. Nevertheless, “special life” is a great package of music, even containing nice remixes of two of Kaito’s 12”-tracks (“everlasting” and “awakening”) so this double-LP places itself beautifully in any university living-community or postmodern cultural- or internet-workers apartment. But if Kaito won’t somehow change his style in the future, I am afraid, I won’t need any new records by him, because this one will suffice.

www.kompakt-net.de

09/2002