One bored afternoon a few years ago I decided to let Amazon.com know what kind of music I like in order to receive some recommendations. I rated a few CDs, checked the suggestions, then rated a few more. No matter how many records I rated, Amazon kept telling me I just had to buy Nobukazu Takemura's Scope. Curious, I clicked the link to the RealAudio clip for "Kepler" and proceeded to have the kind of music listening epiphany that only comes along once in a great while.
It was like this track was designed specifically to trigger the greatest possible emotional response in me personally. There was the mathematical beauty of the repeating percussion pattern, right out of Reich's bag of tricks. A warm organ ran counter to this, suggesting some kind of humanity at the center of this perfect geometry. And then, floating on top and skipping along to the saddest beat I could imagine, was the voice of Aki Tsuyoko, chopped to pieces by the broken machines Oval introduced in the mid-90s. I ordered Scope within a few minutes, and then went back to this painfully brief 30-second clip several times daily until the disc arrived a week later.
I was turned on to Nobukazu Takemura by a computer algorithm. It's fitting, really, considering the direction his music has taken since. Starting with Hoshi No Koe, Takemura has devoted more and more energy to looking for the tin man's heart. I'm guessing that this particular obsession, the search for the emotional core of the machine, has something to with being raised in Japan, a country that seems very comfortable with the idea that robots have feelings. Through the Sign and Mimic Robot EPs Takemura's interest in this area continued to grow (last year's limited edition Water's Suite was clearly a detour, and was constructed from old material besides), and now it comes to full flower on 10th.
While "Sign" stood out on Hoshi No Koe with its pop structure and incorporation of vocals, these elements are the norm on 10th. This is an interesting development because Takemura's handling of vocals is so unique. The vocoder has been in regular use for more than 30 years, and in the past five it's become something of a cliché, but Takemura's treatments are original. With Takemura's music, you never get the sensation that you're hearing a human voice processed by a machine, the way you might with Kraftwerk or Air. Takemura lets the machine sing to the audience directly. In fact, on 10th we're not hearing vocodered human voices, but the sound of a speech synthesizer originally developed for the handicapped.
With the human element removed from the voices on 10th, the effect is ironically even greater pathos. The way Takemura positions these lonely robot boys and girls, we're led to believe that they might never find love. I only wish he'd given them better songs to sing. The musical arrangements are just right, consisting of his usual assortment of electronic instruments and percussion that sound like broken toys. Hearing these tools applied in the service of well-written pop songs would be divine, but the melodies, as performed by the speech synthesizer, just aren't moving. The tune that makes up "FallsLake" sounds like it was written on a keyboard using one finger on a cluster of three black keys. The slippery bass and clouds of harmonic distortion that make "Wandering" sound so damn nice are wasted when the singing machine comes in and pays absolutely no attention to the chords. "Lost Treasure", which appears on the Mimic Robot EP, is better, with a nice bassline, lazy, head-nodding drums, and an interesting vocal rhythm, but there's no possible defense for letting it stretch to nine minutes. Which brings us to the usual Takemura complaint: 10th is a 16 track, 78-minute record. At a time when albums seem to be moving back to a more reasonable length, Takemura's are still pushing an hour and 20 minutes.
So that's the bad news. On the upside, there are a number of great tracks on 10th, and all of my favorites are instrumentals. The simple and poignant CD skipper "Cons", which was also on Mimic Robot, still works for me. The textured drones of "Mumble" manage some interesting harmonic interplay. The playful and sad "Tadasu No Mori" sounds like a lost Child's View classic, with by far the best melody on 10th and some compelling background voices.
The disappointing hit-to-miss ratio on 10th might also have something to do with my introduction to Nobukazu Takemura. The sound I fell in love with when I first heard "Kepler" seems like something Takemura has lost interest in. But the impact of that track on me was so strong, I think of it every time I put on a new Takemura release. I'm always interested in what I hear and I often find something great ("Chrysalis" from Hoshi No Koe is brilliant, for example), but the intensity of that one experience, I'm realizing, is not likely to be repeated.
