A clinical, almost scientific air hangs over the work of Japan’s Kouhei Matsunaga, aka NHK yx koyxen. He makes experimental electronic music that sounds like it is the result of an actual laboratory experiment. His textures crackle with electrical charge; his rhythms morph and multiply like bacteria. You imagine him pulling his beats from test tubes. His rickety structures are part Frankenstein’s monster, part Rube Goldberg contraption—rave heaters fueled by Bunsen burner. But unlike most products of the scientific method, Matsunaga’s music often seems deliberately inscrutable. In place of conventional titles, many of the releases in his voluminous discography make do with numerals. Whatever meaning names like “236,” “190409,” or “7” might have (to say nothing of “1057_S” or “862” or “Y”)—are they file names, parameters, snippets of code?—is left unsaid. If there’s an encryption key to his work, he’s hidden it safely away—soldered to the corroded guts of a malfunctioning Casio keyboard, maybe.
That Matsunaga trained as an architect might not be surprising. No matter how chaotic his music, at its base lies a lattice of intersecting vectors, like a crumpled blueprint. For 20 years, he has orbited the fringes of electronic music, recording for labels like Mille Plateaux and Important, and collaborating with musicians like Merzbow and Mika Vainio. But in the past few years he has come inching in from the cold. After the rhythmic free-for-all of his Dance Classics EPs for the PAN label, last year’s Doom Steppy Reverb, for Oscar Powell’s Diagonal imprint, was his most “techno” record yet. Now he turns up on DFA, of all places. Exit Entrance is hardly a dance-punk or a disco record. But it is a little less hermetic, a little less airless, than his previous recordings. (He has even shifted to word-based titles.) The beats are crisper, the structures marginally closer to traditional dance music. You can imagine DJs playing many of these tracks. The pastel thunder of “Outset” sounds like a Jeff Mills set heard from the alley behind the nightclub; the sludgy “Dignity” could pass for an electro track played back on a turntable with a 16 RPM setting.
The opening “Meeting” sets the record’s tone: As a chintzy keyboard melody plinks away, synthesizers drip like leaky faucets, and a syncopated beat crunches like boots in snow. Cautiously emotive, it is simultaneously playful and distant; it doesn’t quite pass the Turing test. The sequences evolve in such a way that it’s hard to put your finger on what the musician is doing to them; subtle tweaks make frequencies squirm as though alive. Driven by a bruising kick drum and nervous shakers, “Finding” barrels ahead at 140 beats per minute, its rhythm constantly reshaping itself, with no two bars exactly alike. Despite the heavy drums and the open throttle, there’s something coy about its rubbery plucks that sets it apart from most straight-ahead club fare. A similarly toy-like quality infuses the pinging “Intention,” which suggests a breakbeat rave tune modeled in Erector Set, while the drifting acid of “Mutually” conveys a kind of accidental whimsy. Over a scratchy, bare-bones beat, the arpeggio gradually comes unstuck from the scale and blossoms into unexpectedly beautiful harmonies that disappear before anything like sentimentality can settle in. If you told me that a randomized algorithm were responsible for 90% of the composition, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
Even “Dented,” the 12-minute rave maelstrom that closes the album, has this simulacral sensibility: It bangs, but something about its squelch feels not quite right, and the longer it goes on, the more claustrophobic it begins to feel. That’s not to say that everything on the album is so tricky: The short, sketch-like “Notice” offers an oasis of blissful feeling. Rich synthesizer chords glisten like dewdrops and thick, humid reverb drifts upward; it all unrolls as calmly as a stroll in a glassed-in atrium. It’s tempting to hear it as an echo of Japanese environmental music, the ambient subgenre in which atmospheric music is composed with specific spaces—shopping malls, offices, etc.—in mind. In an album full of maze-like rhythms and trapdoors, our architect has penciled in a space of total serenity, one that makes the rest of the album seem all the more dynamic in comparison.
