had enough of the pounding beats of electro ?
worn down by hip hop mashups, bored by 80s pop revival, and battered to death by amped up guitars.
then this calm 30 minute combination of technology and piano loops could indeed bring you right back to all that is good about music. radicalfashion is the name for hirohito ihara and this debut album is coming out via the rather fine hefty records label.
quite simply, the core focus of the album is the piano, and so, with the drifting arpeggios and sunrise melodies that follow the opening real world ambience of opening, you could be easily mistaken to believe that the album is a mispressing, and you’d stumbled upon a bastardised pirate rip of an old richard clayderman album.
thankfully, this is not the case. as the album progresses, sonic twists and turns develop subtly making you glad you didn’t hit the eject button.
modern styled machine loops, vocals cutups and all manner of delicate head turning production comes into play giving one reason to recall the more serene moments of aphex twin. two of the highlights feature carl stone, whoever he is, work really well despite being somewhat at odds with the rest of the album, the fractured clicks and cutup flute sample throughout thousand and gently unsettling distortion in usunibi stretch the established template.
another favourite is shunpoudoh with its cutup vocal samples making it come across as a delightful mix of art of noise and jean michel jarre’s zoolook project in which jarre built whole tracks around midi’d up vocal samples, radicalfashion revisits this idea and mellows the results with the childlike playful piano melodies.
enough of the words, in sumamry, it’s a lovely special little album for those that want a marriage of piano melodies and so-called laptop crunchiness.
simple as.
here’s an example : shunpoudoh
more detail : here