In theory, I love to hear traditional instruments and all their embedded associations mixing with the open-ended signifiers of electronic music. The guitar, so bound to Western popular music since the middle of the 20th century, seems particularly receptive to careful dissection by microprocessor. Many personal favorites from the past five years have come from someone trying to figure out novel ways to process an instrument and render the familiar new.
As you might guess from the name German musician Michael Lückner gives to his project, he's a fan of the six-string. His first record with the name was 2001's Sunkissed, released, appropriately enough, on Morr. The album was a clear tribute to My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, the guiding force for Lückner's experiments in sound manipulation. Following this well-received record, Lückner spent a good deal of time in Japan, and his 2004 Honeysky never made it out of that country. The inspiration for his third record comes from instruments he encountered there, particularly the guitar-like koto and pipa.
They are indeed lovely-sounding instruments, and Lückner ably integrates their timbre into his sound. Problem is, there's not much going on beyond laying loops of various plucked phrases atop dully repetitive mid-tempo drum programming. Tracks throughout feel stiff and ridged; you can almost see the constituent parts of each being dragged and dropped into place and snapped into the grid. Very little processing is happening on "Naoki" and "Red and White", and the tunes are nice enough, but the lack of development and table-flat dynamic range makes for pleasant background music and nothing more.
Vocalist and regular Lückner collaborator Ayako Akashiba joins on "Tokyo Memory" and contributes to most of the remaining tracks. Her style is prototypically Japanese indie, with its high, breathy coos, and it also sounds remarkably like one of the sisters in Múm. Two of the tracks with Akashiba hearken back to Guitar's shoegaze sound, with Lückner running his instruments through a chain of pedals (or some digital equivalent), and these are by far the most interesting. They work because they sound less careful and inhibited, without the fussy concern for every plucked string to be in its precise place. "Sakura Coming", with its throbbing sheets of sound underneath Akashiba's voice, sounds so much sloppier and less mannered than anything that comes before, with a weird mix and timings that don't quite line up. It's a flash of messy life on a record that too often feels half asleep.
