After his band Ponytail broke up, guitarist Dustin Wong put out a few solo guitar albums, instrumental records that used looping techniques to build twinkling pieces that worked like naive recreations of Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint. He also moved to Tokyo, and essentially started over. "There are people who know me from Ponytail, but that’s a fairly small group, so I’m playing to a pretty new crowd," he told the Japan Times recently. One of the people who found their way to one of Wong's shows was Takako Minekawa, the artist and musician who was once an integral part of Tokyo's colorful shibuya-kei scene-- a genially hyperactive, stylish music of the 1990s that skimmed the sugar rush off of lounge pop and cocktail jazz. Minekawa had married the musician Cornelius and mostly stopped making music.
The two, discovering they had a lot in common, found their way to making Toropical Circle, Wong's first collaborative effort since Ponytail disbanded in 2011 and Minekawa's first project in 13 years. Toropical Circle is a lot of things you associate with both Ponytail and Minekawa-- the music is bright, fizzy, exuberant, playful. Wong's solo records, while pleasant, also felt like student exercises from someone working out new forms, but Toropical Circle feels like the record where he takes those techniques and applies them to something more idiosyncratic. Wong fills every corner of the mix on Circle with fascinating sounds, and the record is less a collection of songs than a loose bag of baubles. Picking them out and examining them one by one is the fun of it.
In Wong's hands, the guitar shrinks down to a toy and turns a thousand shades of robin's-egg blue: Sometimes he resembles a shimmering gamelan ensemble ("Swimming Between Parallel Times"); sometimes, a music box slowly winding down. The guitars on "party on a floating cake" (all of the tracks are well named-- "Party On a Floating Cake" nails the album's vibe more succinctly than a review could hope to) are brittle and spiny, like tiny hedgehogs being raked with plastic combs. Over the song's last two minutes, Wong plays tight, pinched little solos high up on the neck, surrounding these little pinging noises with sighing washes of synth. His sound is pearly and fragile, evoking a Renaissance harpsichord more than anything with electricity coursing through it, and he and Minekawa put a fine point on the album's mood with not one, but two interpolations of "Mary Had a Little Lamb".
Minekawa's light, airy voice floats throughout the mix; on the well-named "Windy Prism Room", her voice acts as the titular breeze sighing through Wong's fingerpicking. She often sticks to "oooh" and "la la la," or "doot-doo," picking out hummingbird melodies that complement Wong's. On "New Circle Has Begun", she weaves a charming needlepoint around Wong's guitar, an infectious little melody wandering in a maze of counter-melodies. Toropical Circle builds up layers sneakily this way, and despite being as lovingly confected as a wedding cake, feels casual, like it was abstractedly hummed into existence. It's a low-stakes affair in the best sense; Wong and Minekawa seem to have made this album as simply as little kids invent a story together. For Wong, it's a way to remind us of his still-developing voice and talent; for Minekawa, it's a wonderfully low-key way to ease back into the world of music-making after a long hiatus.
