Bisk: Getaway Package Album Critique
Bisk, aka Tokyo’s Naohiro Fujikawa, has been chrome-plating chaos for a quarter century, turning out documents that are absurd and exhilarating in equivalent measure. A Bisk music almost never follows a straight line for very long: The Japanese producer’s drum programming weaves via knotty thickets of syncopated beats and white-sound bursts, chasing ghosts and dodging potholes. His samples are fragmentary dispatches from significantly-flung points, and any offered musical phrase may well shoehorn several worlds into wobbly union—free improv with uncomplicated listening, kindergarten recess with NASA Mission Control. Beneath every single drum hit lies a probable lure door, and his melodies, if that’s what you can call his tangled scraps of electric powered bass and modal keys, ricochet like pinballs repelled at every turn by shuddering mechanical bumpers. Bisk’s productions give the impression of anyone who is equally addicted to repetition and allergic to it.
Much like his tunes, Fujikawa’s occupation has progressed in matches and starts off. Amongst 1996 and 2000, he recorded four albums for the Belgian label Sub Rosa, a hub for songs from the fringes. It was a heady time in digital songs: Disparate traditions from dance and the avant-garde were being colliding and accordioning like a multi-car pileup, with appears like illbient, drill’n’bass, and hypermodern jazz spinning out of the debris. Bisk’s early albums offered a fractured mirror of the times, variously reflecting the breakbeat mutations of Amon Tobin and DJ Krush, the aspect-eyed synths of Atom Coronary heart and Aphex Twin, and the referential totally free-for-all of Christian Marclay and John Zorn. Then he disappeared for a dozen several years, returning in the mid ’10s to launch a handful of sleeker, far more streamlined albums right before slipping silent again. Now Bisk is back—this time on Ominira, a label run by Leipzig’s Kassem Mosse, whose grudging, lo-fi device minimalism is the virtual reverse of Fujikawa’s hyperactive antics. Bisk, while, appears as cheerfully unhinged as at any time.
“Sectional View” opens the album with a feint—it could almost be a rather traditional footwork keep track of. But instead of leaning into the groove, all the extra elements—cut-up R&B vocals, errant brass stabs, overdriven Rhodes riffs—peel forcefully absent from it, as nevertheless balking at the plan of slipping into line. It all provides up to an octopus’ yard of brightly coloured shapes that adamantly refuse to cohere. Very similar high speeds and wayward arranging ideas use to most of the album. “Suddenly Appeared” drizzles electric-piano operates over fast-fireplace tabla and kalimba, throwing off bright harmonics that dazzle like one of Yayoi Kusama’s mirror-dotted infinity rooms. “Like Peaches,” a spotlight, employs rippling drum’n’bass cadences and naive synth melodies recalling Squarepusher’s Feed Me Weird Issues. There are Zapp-like talk-box prospects, cooing choral pads, and so numerous levels of condition-shifting synthesizer, all in perpetual flux, that they are practically impossible to tease aside. In “Winter Spreading” and “Sweet Conquest,” wealthy chord progressions lend a shockingly sentimental air, as nevertheless Paul Bley had been sitting in with Flying Lotus.
New music this agitated can don on the nerves, but Bisk’s does not. His tracks are mercifully short the large the greater part are below 3:30. And as substantially as Fujikawa packs into every evaluate, he also leaves a good deal of breathing home. The rests are so generous that you could drive a truck by them. It allows that it in no way feels like Fujikawa is attempting to be clever as hectic as the tunes gets, it’s refreshingly free of “look ma, no hands” showoffery. The album’s substance is centered on club sets he done at a “small but pretty radical” Tokyo location referred to as Forestlimit in late 2019 and early 2020, and recognizing that he pulled all this off dwell would make his polyphonic pyrotechnics all the a lot more extraordinary. His audio appears like the operate of somebody hunched above his personal computer mouse, diligently mapping out maze-like MIDI sequences on the monitor. To consider this stuff traveling out of his machines in true time delivers a full unique impression. It will become crystal clear that jazz, for Fujikawa, isn’t just a reference issue, a readymade mood to be minimize and pasted into the combine. It’s an ethos. His knotted-up kinks and curlicues are pathways, escape routes, idiosyncratic lines of flight. All that blurred motion is an try to seize a snapshot of liberty in mid-stride.
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