In Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 1957 composition Kontakte, a buzzing tone suddenly sputters into a cloud of sporadic pulses—the apex of the piece’s demonstration of the interrelation between rhythm, timbre, and pitch.The avant-garde titan would later call this the “concept of unity in electronic music”—a paradigm opened up by electronics’ superhuman capacity to modulate sound. Koshiro Hino, leader of Osaka band goat (jp), flips Stockhausen’s compositional ideas on their head, using guitar, saxophone, and bass as percussion instruments in human-powered simulations of programmed polyrhythms. Rather than rely on the precision of machinery, the group taps into the creative tension in human fallibility. Their latest record emerged from a collaboration with the Belgian choreographer Cindy Van Acker, who commissioned the band for her 2021 dance piece Without References after the passing of her longtime collaborator Mika Vainio. Composed to support Van Acker’s exploration of mediated perception, goat (jp)’s Without References / Cindy Van Acker builds upon the physicality of the band’s exacting performances.
The score dates to 2020—preceding goat (jp)’s 2023 album Joy in Fear, on which orbiting rhythms realigned in moments of astrometric fulfillment—and marks a significant textural shift from 2015’s warmer, woolier Rhythm & Sound. The impetus for Hino’s new compositional approach here was the 2016 departure of the band’s original drummer, Tetsushi Nishikawa, after which Hino began to explore the metallic textures of Indonesian gamelan and Korean kkwaenggwari, to hypnotic effect. “Throne hh” follows a seemingly erratic sequence of gongs whose structure eludes the ear even as it’s grounded by a ubiquitous friction drum.
At the core of their sound remains a stuttering, off-kilter approach to rhythm; you can hear it best in the stop-start chimes of “Orin,” which has echoes in the muted guitar harmonics of Joy and Fear’s “III I IIII III.” Patiently developing over 10 minutes, “Orin” begins as a rhythmic Rorschach test, with three metallic tones whose relationships to each other morph depending on where you focus your year. Only in the third minute are sporadic bells finally allowed to resonate above the three braiding tones; halfway through, a bell fades in and swells at a regular clip, later joined by a motorik shaker that delineates the pulse. The track is a microcosm of Hiro’s compositional strengths, manipulating the interplay between groove and imbalance.
The group’s mimicry of machine precision is no Luddite gimmick. While some might consider goat (jp)’s pursuit of mechanical precision futile, the tics introduced by human performance hint at a physicality that can’t be programmed. “Factory” demonstrates this best, beginning as a monotonous onslaught of clicks that could be mistaken for an overly tight Ableton loop yet gradually revealing minute variations in stress and interval. You can almost feel the carpal tunnel. Even experienced without its choreographed counterpart, Without References / Cindy Van Acker exudes a physicality that AI plugins and MIDI sequencers have yet to crack.
Though goat (jp) are generally known for turning every instrument into a drum machine, Without References / Cindy Van Acker does contain forays into more freeform compositions. “G-H-S” is four minutes of meandering solo metallophone whose relaxing tones wouldn’t feel out of place in a kankyō ongaku reissue compilation. And album closer “CR” is an all-encompassing haze of gongs, their interfering resonances coalescing into a mass of sound. Where the off-kilter rhythms of tracks like “Quest” interlock like Lego blocks, “G-H-S” and “CR” chart new textural territory. Without References / Cindy Van Acker is a masterclass in creativity through constraint—the machines aren’t replacing us yet, no matter how perfect their polyrhythms may be.
