Tashi Wada was born into the avant-garde. Growing up in a building shared by Fluxus artists, Wada lived next door to the choreographer Simone Forti. Video artist Nam June Paik was in the apartment upstairs. His father, legendary composer Yoshi Wada, worked as a plumber by day and an artist by night, stretching the limits of minimalism by incorporating Scottish bagpipes and Indian ragas. Tashi’s own work is rarely described without reference to those pioneering drones, but he shrugs off questions about paternal influence. “Sometimes I have a sense of how my work is perceived in relation to my father’s, but I tend to limit my understanding to my own personal space and how I feel about it,” he said in a 2019 interview. “I leave the rest to the world to sort out.”
While the younger Wada’s musical output is certainly related to the elder’s, it’s no imitation. Yoshi tended toward grand gestures, recording bagpipes in an empty swimming pool or composing for startlingly loud auditory flares normally used for nautical emergencies. Tashi is more academic, preferring to generate microtones with unusual tuning systems rather than through massive volume. After studying with James Tenney, he forged a link between the Fluxus movement and a newer generation of artists centered around the CalArts music program. The 2018 album Nue, credited to Tashi Wada with Yoshi Wada and Friends, represented a passing of the torch: Yoshi and Forti featured alongside CalArts alums Julia Holter and Corey Fogel. With What Is Not Strange?, Wada takes the next step, moving from the periphery of his father’s community to the center of his own and demonstrating a newfound maturity as a composer in the process.
The biggest surprise here is that Wada has written honest-to-goodness songs, albeit rather strange ones. This shift is due in part to life events that drew him away from abstraction and toward more expressive forms. In the years after Nue, Yoshi passed away and Tashi had a child with Holter, his partner. “Grand Trine,” a sprightly chamber-pop number, celebrates their daughter. Its title refers to three planets forming an equilateral triangle on her astrological chart, but the trio of father, mother, and daughter is clearly the song’s subject. “She is my star,” Holter croons over elegant harpsichord and strings. The instrumentation leaps to abrupt climaxes only to fade away again and again, like surges of joy that dissipate only to return with renewed vigor. But the mood is troubled in the following song, “Revealed Night,” which is built on an urban field recording of sirens in the distance, evoking the pandemic into which she was born.
The microtonal minimalism of Wada’s early compositions appears as well. The back half of the album drifts away from song-based pieces into an ocean of drones that uneasily ebbs and flows, with seasick synths tuned in an obscure 18th-century temperament that makes even a triumphant crescendo sound dissonant to modern ears. The nadir of this section is “Calling,” a dead-calm wash of strings and synths, but the wave crests again with “Plume,” which patiently builds into a dramatically spiraling finale.
Wada is best as a bandleader who lets his extensive knowledge of alternate tunings inform, rather than dictate, the shape of his tracks. At times, he trades his austere minimalism for rambunctious maximalism, letting his bandmates—experienced noise-makers all—explore the parameters he has set. “Flame of Perfect Form” is a sizzling freeform workout that, at its peak, recalls the psychedelic barrage of Acid Mothers Temple, while “Subaru” deploys just intonation in the service of a slightly off-kilter earworm melody that’s all the more memorable for its odd tonal character.
The album ends with “This World’s Beauty,” a delicate miniature that again combines Holter’s vocals with Wada’s harpsichord. Its graceful and compact form, just 1:40 long, is the closest to a standard verse-chorus-verse tune in Wada’s discography. But on an album full of surprising detours, it represents his breakthrough: a simple statement of purpose from a composer newly confident in his abilities. With What Is Not Strange?, Wada honors his father’s legacy, but he also begins to carve out his own.
