TANHÂ is a collaboration by Japanese artists Arµ-2 and Lee. On each track, mangled samples are fused into colorful masses that convulse for a couple minutes and then humbly fade away. The album belongs to a strand of meta-music that takes the surplus of recorded media as both backdrop and subject. The Books, working from physical sources, staked out this collagist approach near the beginning of the previous decade, and their name is insolubly linked to the concept of forging obscure narratives from audiovisual errata, drawing as much attention to the medium as the message.
TANHÂ updates the Books' approach for contemporary times; its disturbances are contextualized by stuttering streams and nested browser windows instead of crackling vinyl and faltering radio waves. The pitch-bent vocal fragments are grounded, however distantly, in hip-hop rather than folk. If the Books evoked waking up to the sound of a possessed radio, TANHÂ is like falling asleep while multiple Pandora stations play at once on a lagging connection, dreamlike narratives emerging from the clash of clipping signals.
Digital sampling is a much less arcane art these days, so *TANHÂ'*s connoisseurial approach to junky abundance feels familiar. One song is called "⌘v", a keystroke instantly familiar to any Mac user, indicative of how commonplace and codified cut-and-paste music has become. But even if music like this no longer packs the potential to blow minds, the record remains compelling for its striking sense of design, concentrated doses of emotion, and a sweet melodic sense that softens the aggressively choppy rhythms—the latter of which can also sound refreshingly delicate at times, like pebbles rolling through a reverberant cave. Rap, fusty standards, spoken dialogue, and zany sound effects roil through deconstructed beats and cottony melodies, streaked with traces of Japanese folk, classical and ambient music. The bright, gulping electronics recall fellow Japanese artist Radicalfashion, while twinkling piano themes evoke the contemplative moods of Akira Kosemura.
Lee has claimed a J Dilla influence, but that soulful lope is nowhere in evidence. Hip-hop shows up in prismatic fragments—an MC's disembodied "Hey"s punching through the cinematic trip-hop of "aśrava", or samples from Fat Joe's "Firewater" twisted into paperclip shapes to fasten together the high-contrast cuts of "sen". The boldest tracks have either a more cartoonish or sentimental feel. The former is epitomized by "sankhara", where the percussion evokes gremlins busily dismantling a plane in a wartime Bugs Bunny cartoon, and "muditā", where dreamy pianos and synths mix with braying Woody Woodpecker-like laughter to forge a beguiling blend of sweetness and madness. The sentimental aspect comes to the fore in “dukkha”, which revolves around Nat King Cole's "For Sentimental Reasons", and "三", built around the "Schoolhouse Rock" chestnut "3 is a Magic Number".
"dukkha" lands with a schmaltzy jolt of familiarity, but its producers really do seem to be in a sentimental mood, giving the song a respectful and emotional treatment of gently jammed-up lounge piano. These tracks' short lengths don't allow for room to develop, which makes them seem more based on tenets of design than music—like something you’d hear at an art installation. So the aforementioned two songs are key, lending the record a more intimately human nature.
There's a thin stretch near the end of TANHÂ where several tracks linger without standing out, but the album rallies for a strong finish with the songful "mantra" and the closing title track, where the producers smooth out the aggressive disturbance they've cultivated to impress us with what they can do from a compositional standpoint rather than a technical one. While this kind of music may no longer sound like the future, it makes for an arresting view of the present in idiosyncratic hands such as these.
