On his Twitter account, cartoony producer De De Mouse has described his new Faraway Girl EP as feeling “like traditional Japanese summer,” which is a very specific description. He didn’t write “traditional Japanese summer music” – I originally put that in assuming that is what he said – but just a general seasonal feel, one where “traditional” is really vague. Like, traditionally Edo period, or what De De Mouse traditionally did with his month off from school? Regardless, Faraway sounds like a typical summer based off the song titles – “Firework Girl” conjures up July 4th explosions or August hanabi, “Suburbia Tonight” captures the summer destination a lot of people ended up as teenagers, while “Majestic Boring Day” sorta speaks for itself. Alongside the new √thumm album (review forthcoming), De De Mouse has made a nice artistic statement about the simple life during one of the laziest times of the year.
Sonically, he’s still up to his old tricks – mainly, taking cheery vocal samples and razoring them into multi-colored ribbons of noise, before throwing them on top of his Fun-Dipped instrumentation. “Firework Girl” hotfoots between plip-plopping techno and skippy meditation, while closer “Murmur On My Foot” splices up Macspeak voices into a new digital language. The highlight, and one of De De Mouse’s best moments period, comes on sorta title track “Faraway Place.” His usual voice-cutting goes on normally until the big echoey beat creeps in…then the song starts morphing into a twinkling number boasting one of Mouse’s most emotionally resonant atmospheres to date – the wanderlust-inducing sparkles and big booming bring to mind images of lazy summer days spent stretched out dreaming of distant places, locales far more adventerous than your backyard. On a very fine EP, it is the youthful highlight. Get it on iTunes.