 Hikashu
aren't in this to make things easy. As the most challenging of
technopop's "Big Three" (the other two being The Plastics and P-Model,)
they took the blippy New Wave of that movement and squished it like a
stress ball, causing all sorts of weird and interesting shapes to
emerge from the tightly clenched fist of the band's considerable
musicianship. Not the least considerable of the musicianship in
question was the wildly dynamic vocalist Koichi Makigami, who laced
even the band's more traditional pop moments with an out of left field,
almost fanatical energy that took on more forms than could possibly be
listed here. Dude's all over the place.
Dude's still all over the place, but in the thirty years since
Hikashu's self titled debut, those more traditional pop elements have
all but vanished. The band's most recent effort, 転転々 (Ten Ten Ten) is
mostly improvised, which has allowed Makigami's singular muse to…well,
to stop pretending. Without the constraints of the pop format, he's
free to burp, squeak, yell, and generally freak out in ways that are
too good natured to be truly off putting. It's absurdly self indulgent,
but the collective imagination of the ever shifting personnel is
dynamic and succinct enough to make that self indulgence more than
enough reason to listen.
That said, opening track "ニコセロン" ("Nikoseron") is a pop song, kind of.
Finding the band somewhere between 80s era Residents, New York New Wave
abstraction, and RIO (Rock In Opposition,) it's as warmly inviting as
it is confounding. Vaguely structured chaos still manages to cohere as
deep, playful tones hover in the background, creating a sonic landscape
that sounds like art students goofing at a playground.
"Nikoseron" (and "Nikoseron Part 2," which ends the disc, effectively
bookending the proceedings) is the closest Ten Ten Ten gets to "songs,"
as such, and the remainder of the album is dedicated to Hikashu's
considerable talent of creating not just a mood, but a situation.
Things happen in these bites
of noise, and the most impressive thing about it all is that the tracks
feel like complete ideas, despite the fact that they clearly have no
traditional structure. "声はまだ泡の中にある" ("Koe Wa Mada Awa No Naka Ni Aru,"
i.e. "The Voice Is Still Inside The Bubble") evokes a dark, alien
swamp, full of weird space creatures who gripe like a gaggle of Muppets
trying to communicate via burps and snorts...in other words, hilarious.
At five and a half minutes, it's the longest track on the album, but is
so densely packed with creative intensity that it still feels short
(not that five and a half minutes drags into "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"
territory, or anything.)
Each of Ten Ten Ten's fifteen tracks paints that vivid a picture, and
while the relative brevity of these sonic explorations prevents true
immersion in the group's particularly odd headspace, the surface
delights are more than enough. Experimental, freeform, improvised music
is rarely this good natured, and even the occasional touches of
darkness seem tongue in cheek, almost deadpan. Ten Ten Ten exists in
the weird space between noise and music, yet retains an almost
childlike playfulness in this highly cerebral zone, a balancing act
that earns an adjective that is rarely affixed to such heavy
experimentation: delightful.
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