Back in the early 90s, when Yoshihide's music began appearing stateside, either as leader of the incendiary Ground-Zero or on his solo plunderphonic-oriented recordings, he was tagged with the sobriquet, "the John Zorn of Japan" and it was as well earned as it may have been unfair. His range of interests and playing styles was vast, from the most abstract electronics to various aspects of jazz and rock in addition to romantic-oriented soundtrack work. This was both a source of fascination and frustration. For every transcendent project, from the dizzying, sparse beauty of I.S.O. to the incredibly strong Consume Red (and its variants) to several powerful releases on erstwhile, there were recordings that made one ask, "Why is he wasting his time?" While some might be excused as failed experiments, including several experimental electronic works, others, like the lengthy New Jazz Orchestra project, strike this listener as worlds removed from something like I.S.O. not only in approach but in the meagerness of the conception though, one presumes, it has garnered him far more popularity and, one hopes, income, enough to entice J-pop demi-stars like Kahimi Karie into the fold. Recently, he's embarked on a similar "reinventive" idea using a rock band. This recording would seem to occupy a space about halfway between his electronic adventures and his current preoccupation and sad to say, it doesn't work very well.
The album's title provides you with pretty much all the information you need to construct an accurate expectation of the general sound area involved. The opening and closing several minutes of the 40-minute single track are just fine, sustained drones that waver only slightly and imply a great deal of activity occurring just below the surface. The Otomo of I.S.O. might have been inclined to simply let them sit, perhaps offering a subtle nudge here and there, allowing the drone to rotate out into space, a beautiful object in and of itself. Otomo v. 2007, however, insists on not only messing around incessantly with the feedback but doing so in a fashion that recalls archaic hard rock thrash sessions, the sort of third rate Hendrix-isms that attained popularity in early 70s. You can hear an attempt, perhaps, to stretch out the kind of bombastic noise attack originally used to spice up otherwise lackluster rock guitar solos, to greatly enough extend and stretch a slab of that music so that it occupies a noise-territory of its own, but by leaving in precisely those intentional, self-conscious kind of decisions that generated the bombast in the first place, it becomes a self-defeating exercise. Too much shoving, not nearly enough listening. For Otomo completists only.
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