It’s way too easy to draw comparisons between Ayutthaya and tricot, to the point where it should feel kinda like a trap. And…it is! At least for the most part. The trio put out their first EP last year, Good Morning, a set moving from chugging rock recalling American Football and similar ’90s groups (“Grapefruits”) to zippier numbers (“Kufuku”). “Mottainai” finds them stretching their sound out a bit more, plotting out guitar lines a bit more clearly and utilizing repetition more to musical affect. Most notably, the vocals come the chorus loop the titular word over and over again, adding a dreamy touch to a band whose music was pretty tactile up to this point. So yeah…on paper sounds a lot like tricot, but “Mottainai” excels thanks more to space than displays of skill, with the whole song a little more understated, and for the better. That is until the final stretch, when Ayutthaya let the song burst open and lead singer Mio Ohta cuts loose and lets the emotion pour out. Which, is pretty tricot-like…but done in a way that suits them, with the same impact. Listen above.
Electronic Round-Up: Room-T, Takeda Soshi And Toccoyaki
— Cosmopolyphonic associate Tidal started a new project called Room-T, for all things funk and soul. It’s a deliberate throwback, and “Fools Garden” loads up on tight bass notes and drum machine hits to really make that 80s / 90s feel soak through. Yet despite the very specific time range Tidal eyes with this track, the lack of vocals make it still feel a little less aged than it should, its elastic nature sounding just as welcome in 2018 as 1988. Listen above.
— On a similar nostalgia kick, Takeda Soshi returns with a new house number that has a little bit of a memory haze around it. “Costa Rica Adults Only Romance,” however, avoids the faded feel of lo-fi house in favor of tropical splashes bringing to mind Dorian or PellyColo. Besides having a light waft of melancholy to it, it’s also just a bouncy fun track. Listen below.
— Finally, something with no past trappings to it! Toccoyaki teams up with Sanso Nakamura for a bubbly pop number that manages a fizzy feeling without overloading the track. Rather, the pair use space to accentuate the rollicking electronic beat and Nakamura’s singing. Listen below.
New Woopheadclrms: Vs o.t.O.g.I
The Japanese experimental community built around high-impact samples and disjointed electronic melodies that should rupture but always meld continues strong in 2018, and Aichi’s Woopheadclrms only adds to the growing catalog. They waste no time getting attention — second song “Empire of Shopping Mall” opens with spacious electronic waves, but a hi-def scream rips through the calm before an onslaught of, like, octaned-up radio bumpers (a cornerstone sonic influence on Woopheadclrms and others in this community) crash around. From there, delicate piano notes collide with distorted electronic noise and jazz beats (“Meaning”), sampled talking morphing into electric guitar squall (“Indie”), and all sorts of things fracture (like, every song on the album). Helping out Woopheadclrms’ latest are interludes that usually just fiddle around with vocal samples, offering a breather before the next experiment in breaking sounds down and making them inexplicably fit together. Get it here, or listen below.
New Amunoa: “Alright Now”
Producer Amunoa usually makes swift, sample-skipping tracks that feel like confetti cannons going off. But on “Alright Now,” they go a little bit more inward and try out a more relaxed pace. It opens in a daze, faded guitar notes swirling around before giving way for a beat content to shuffle along rather than burst out. It offers plenty of space for Amunoa to play around with a sweet little vocal sample, bending it all over the place, and to dapple more guitar and synth notes over it. If most Amunoa songs are letting something out, this is the sound of breathing something in. Listen above.
New Hentonacyoyu: Eisha Shitsu
Jazz — like 8-bit music — has factored into plenty of juke over the years, so what Hentonacyoyu does on Eisha Shitsu isn’t trailblazing. But they do it really well across these five original tracks. Hentonacyoyu sprinkles the sort of piano and guitar melodies you expect to hear in film scenes set in smoky bars over the first few songs, while also letting modern drum machine beats volley around too. Acid bass squiggles in on “Usuzumi,” but after that it is back to piano-based melodies, even if they get blurred up on closer “Wa.” Get it here, or listen below.