3 out of 5

Label: VHF Records

Produced by: Kawabata Makoto

Another longform exploration under the Inui banner from Makoto Kawabata, sequenced as one, hour+ track titled ‘Ryo’.

This, as always, is an interesting one, but the way it’s structured – for me – undermines the experience. When music extends out to this length, I expect / want it to do one of a few things: especially with drone, I’m looking for something meditative, that I can sink in to; when it’s more involved than drone (or it transitions to something more involved), I want that space to be used narratively – to ebb and flow meaningfully.

The initial 30 minutes of Inui accomplishes the meditation. Water burbles and shimmering electronics hum over patient, psychedelic guitar. It’s organic enough to suggest nature – sitting by a busy pond, for example – but also busy enough to trigger some wandering thoughts, bumped into pricklier territory by the “alien” nature of the electronics versus the more organic sounds. Pretty fantastic stuff. Right at about that half-hour mark, though, Makoto maintains the top layer of burbles and whatnot but reverses the guitar sounds. It kind of speedruns us back through the 30 minutes fittingly: in reverse. In other words, it sort of undoes whatever you’ve been thinking about; it trivializes it. That is a kind of magic, and perhaps worth thinking on in itself, but it’s not an effect I really enjoyed – accepting that says something more about me than the music. Either way, it doesn’t feel like an evolution of what we’ve been listening to, just a manipulation.

The reversal fades out eventually, at about 45 minutes, and we coast on just the top layer for a little bit before a hard stop occurs, and the remaining 20 minutes or so is akin to layered feedback, or “glissando” guitar as I’m told by the media copy. It’s not unpleasant, though it’s a strange pairing that again feels like an attempt to disrupt whatever progress we’ve made. We’ve wound back to the beginning; now let’s start over with noise as the guiding factor instead of drone.

Conceptually interesting stuff; subjectively questionable impact. As such, as I pretty often say with music of this type – your mileage may greatly vary.