It took 13 years for Japanese shibuya-kei artist Takako Minekawa to figure out a way back into music, and after that protracted silence comes color, exploding out into the ether. Minekawa signed off in 2000 with the Maxi On EP, only to return in 2013 for a collaborative work with former Ponytail guitarist Dustin Wong, the beautifully light Toropical Circle. Here, the pair team up for Savage Imagination, released just over a year later. Everything is a little tighter and brighter, with the personalities of Minekawa and Wong burning harder than before. It’s a jubilant, uplifting work, taking on several shades of happiness as it turns through its 43 minutes. It becomes delirious, then studied, then affable, a process the pair loops through and then turns inside out over and over again. There’s plenty of repetition, but it’s a deceptively complex work, full of tiny details and bursts of what Wong acutely terms “ecstatic energy.”
It’s hard to imagine a more different foil for Wong than Minekawa compared to the music he made alongside Molly Siegel in Ponytail. When stacking those aspects of his work together, Savage Imagination becomes the daybreak after the tortuous night before, resembling a need for tranquility after endless stretches of torn flesh and broken limbs. Minekawa’s a serene presence, helping tease out a softer side to the base rigidity of Wong’s guitar loops. On the bell-like “Dancing Venus of Aurora Clay”, the parts trigger off one another like they’re playing an extended game of tag, with Minekawa the balmy center of it all, swooping in with whoops and sighs in all the right places. At their most playful, on the beautifully cluttered “Ancient Aluminum Forest”, they weave dense layers of sound, with pops, whispers, and sighs all spinning around to the point of lightheadedness.
Both musicians have an acute ear for mixing fine details with light whimsy, causing Savage Imagination to occasionally reflect the spirit of the notoriously fastidious BBC Radiophonic Workshop, especially when sprightly analog synth noises reach prominence. There’s also a debt to the anything-goes sampling approach of '90s producers like the Dust Brothers. “Luminescent Earth Traveler” brings in distorted samples of dogs barking and twisted strings, while “She He See Feel” is all compressed handclaps with a keyboard line that would make Money Mark proud. It’s Wong’s playing, laced through this record like a thick piece of thread, that positions it apart from all that, with his distinct work becoming ever more inventive with each passing record (and there are many of them). Sometimes it resembles a ping pong ball giddily bouncing back and forth at impossible speeds, passing by in a barely perceptible blur.
The heart of this record is divided into three parts, in a series of songs Minekawa and Wong have called their “Dimension Dive” trilogy. It’s the spiritual half-cousin to the outwardly fun hew of the rest of the album, anchored in new age drift, bringing in deliberately conflicting rhythms, working in darker strokes reminiscent of krautrock, and adding a bassier undertow toward its close. The “Dimension Dive” tracks sometimes sound like they belong on a different record altogether, although taken in the grab-bag context of Savage Imagination it just about works. It’s just that elsewhere there’s a more coherent flow from one change to the next—a sense of getting picked up and pulled along in the euphoric blitz of ideas that rushes from one song to the next. That surge of creativity between Minekawa and Wong is infectious at times. Hopefully this is a beginning, not an end, to their work together.
