New Skip Club Orchestra: Vita Activa
Leave it to Japan’s juke scene to deliver an album inspired by Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. Skip Club Orchestra’s latest — released on New Year’s Eve, making this (I think) the last 2017 collection I needed to catch up on — features 20 songs, all of them hovering right around the three minute mark. Although every song here is titled after the album itself — “an active life” — a sense of unease runs throughout most of SCO’s minimalist dance tracks. Some of these inclusions skitter and sound like electrical sockets sparking off. Of course, it’s this tension between physical and foreboding that defines a lot of our favorite juke producers in Japan, so if SCO wants to spend his leisure time making an album like this, go for it. Get it here, or listen below.
