"Draw a straight line and follow it" instructs the score to LaMonte Young's "Composition 1960 #10". One vector leads here, to slender, interwoven strands of drone braided from processed guitar, vibraphone, and assorted electronics. A first listen to this kind of minimalism brings to mind questions of purity. One wonders just how tightly the beam of sound will be focused, whether the music will exist exclusively on a long thin wire, fully accessible only with magnification. What sort of commitment will it take to follow the changes, sense the development, and hear what's really going on?
In the case of Chihei Hatakeyama, releasing his first solo album after a number of collaborations with like-minded Tokyo improvisers, the answer to the question of purity is "not so pure, really." Hatakeyama uses the palette of the True Drone Believers but he seeds his overstretched chords with easy pleasures. It's in the way the monolithic chord with harmonics like a pipe organ fills the first two minutes of "Swaying Curtain in the Window", only to slowly dissolve into a tinkling music box melody and, finally, clouds of acoustic guitar picking. So while the processed whine of "Bonfire on the Field" evokes the exquisite singularity of Keith Whitman's Playthroughs system, "Towards a Tranquil Marsh" combines that mediation on the held tone with a relaxed tune and identifiable chords, a campfire song from a planet with two suns. Throughout Minima Moralia, Hatakeyama thinks of sound as vibration first, but conventional ideas about when such movement becomes music quickly come into play.
It's true, yes, a number of musicians are already working his ground, but Hatakeyama has his own voice. There's a distance here that develops in part from the music's deep undercurrent of calm. Weighed against the delicacy and surface-level charm is an odd sense of remove that keeps the music from becoming overly sentimental. And you never get the sense that something surprising lurks around the corner, which might strike some as a negative but to me gives the music a greater sense of expansiveness. Only on the closing "Beside a Well" does any real dissonance creep in, as Hatakeyama gradually piles on distortion until his music finally crosses over into places covered by Tim Hecker and, more recently, Belong. A hint, maybe, of where his music might one day go; in any event, he's off to an excellent start.
