| Hoahio - Ohayo! Hoahio! |
| Even
in the collaboration happy Japanese underground, Hoahio is still
remarkable. After Dinner head Haco, koto player Michiyo Yagi, and
electronics guru Sachiko M are notable not only for their individual
accomplishments, but as a group, they're a curious combination: Yagi
tends to stick to natural sound, occasionally playing to the acoustics
of the room, Sachiko M is pure circuitry, and Haco...well, it's
difficult to explain exactly where Haco fits in this particular
continuum, but the wide eyed sense of cluttered wonder she demonstrated
in After Dinner acts as effective glue for the other, more disparate
approaches. "Ohayo! Hoaiho!" is their 2000 debut, a remarkable (and remarkably seamless) blending of these three minds that is by turns accessible, charming, confounding, chilly, sparse, sensual, impenetrable, and a whole lot of other adjectives. No one personality dominates, even when one or more members step back to let the other take over for a while. In other words, it actually sounds like a group, not just a collective. "Hoahio Song" sounds like a factory, some great Hoahio machine mass producing...something. The band's name is chanted, manipulated, and chopped as industrial blocks of sound chug along with machinelike efficiency. It's a curious but effective opener, setting a tone for an album that could go just about anywhere based on this track alone. "Jellyfish" is one of the more openly pretty songs on the album, Hack singing with only Yagi's koto as accompaniment, until Sachiko M's squelches and beeps gently swell from below, eventually opening the song into a bright world that fits the title perfectly. "Happy Mail" is the album at its most accessible, effortlessly blending fragile and delicate shards of koto, krautrock-esque space swirls, and vocals that sound like they could have come from a traditional song poem. It's strange to think of music like this as avant garde, since it goes down so smoothly. Nothing difficult about this. "Seeds" is another story, however. Those of us old enough to remember dial up modems might be reminded of the abrupt, sterile shifts in tone from those archaic devices. "Sea Wall III" is a cut 'n' paste tone poem that swings sharply from pure electronic noise to sinister koto trills and back again, as sonically fascinating as it is ultimately shapeless. It genuinely invokes a virile, dangerous world of unfathomable creatures, swirling in cold darkness. There's also "Chit Chat," which sounds like a conversation between birds trapped in circuitry, ghostly chirps echoing down a well of sound. The crown jewel of the album, however, is "Less Than Lovers, More Than Friends," an unspeakably gorgeous meditation of sound. Using the chord progression from "With Or Without You" in a much more peaceful way, the song is simultaneously seduction and lullaby, with warm electronics providing a cushion for Haco's ghostly, longing vocals. It's every bit as immediate as "Sea Wall III" is difficult, a whispered closing to an album that has challenged and soothed in equal measure. There would be one more Hoahio album, "Peek-Ara-Boo," without Sachiko M, and while it has its strengths, it doesn't contain the warm expansiveness of this album. The three would, of course, continue their careers, all pushing their respective boundaries (Haco in particular would go on to record with Acid Mothers Temple.) While there are plenty of examples of warmth, experimentation, and challenge in each of their subsequent works, they captured lightning in a bottle with this project. Recommended. |