Australia's Lawrence and Rebecca English have spent the past few years proving that the everyday can be avant-garde. The husband-and-wife pair run Someone Good, while Lawrence curates sister imprint Room40, a preeminent experimental label that has recently put out records by the ambient-inclined Grouper and Tim Hecker. Someone Good takes a more modest, domestic view of gorgeous textural abstraction, releasing music often by Japan-based artists: avant-twee couple Lullatone, piano minimalist Akira Kosemura, Tenniscoats offshoot Nikasaya. This is simple yet elegant stuff.
As Miko, Tokyo-based Rie Mitsutake assembles vividly mic'd piano, acoustic guitar, and off-kilter percussion-- along with field recordings and her own hushed vocals-- into languidly immersive sound worlds that make the familiar wonderfully strange. Her 2008 debut, Parade, successfully introduced the basic elements of Miko's developing aesthetic, but that effort placed a greater emphasis on glimmering electronics and at times used near-shoegaze levels of ear-splitting distortion. Sophomore album Chandelier, like Kosemura's excellent Polaroid Piano from last year, takes a turn toward the organic. The result shapes restrained, homespun instrumentation into something at once quaint and futuristic.
Someone Good is billing Miko's latest as a "new kind of folk music," and that's apt. Bird-like squawks and delicate vocals transcend their potential cutesiness to attain a sort of ascetic grace ("Sea House"); Talk Talk-inclined drums gently splash behind indie pop plinks and plonks ("Kikoeru"); saxophones drift past thrumming acoustic guitar ("New Town"). When Miko sings the word "America", on the hypnotic track of the same name, she conjures up a faraway place vastly different from the one I know. Compared with traditional folk song, there's certainly more attention paid to what words and sounds sugges [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| t rather than their literal meanings. [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| (Apparently Miko chose the title Chandeliers as much for its spoken sound as for its associations with light and warmth). But there's also a sense of intimacy, of basic human connection, on which the old avant-garde might look with disdain. That would be missing the point.
