Even experimental music has its conventions. Within the genre’s sphere, there are poles of minimalism, microtonality, noise, ambience, deconstructed clatter and pillowy hypnagogics, all of which have their adherents and all of which have been fertile breeding grounds for any number of beautiful or groundbreaking works of art. Tashi Wada has always been slightly different. His music takes aim at a point just beyond a recognised convention or cluster of conventions. His drones are more than drones: they squirm and pulse, modulate and stridulate. His melodies are open to the influence of chamber music and pop but always seem to dodge their final destination and end up somewhere far more interesting. His loops are broken in unexpected places.
That the New York-born, LA-based Tashi Wada should take a playful, fluid approach to his practice should come as no surprise: his father, Yoshi Wada was a leading figure in Fluxus, the movement of avant-garde pranksters that grew up around the loosely affiliated ideas of John Cage, Joseph Beuys, La Monte Young, Marcel Duchamp and George Brecht, while his mother is the visual artist and gallery owner Marilyn Bogerd. The music on What Is Not Strange? was conceived and composed in the wake of his father’s death and the birth of his daughter in 2021, and these events influence the mood, and most likely the literal content, of the album. The warped warbles of the title track seem like a challenge or the invitation to play a mysterious new game, and you get the impression that the mystery and newness is felt as keenly by Wada as by his listeners.
It’s as if all new experience is a kind of experiment which can either be embraced or ignored, and Wada is very definitely one of life’s embracers. Those quick waves of keyboard on the title track are matched by the carefully positioned vocals of Wada’s long-term collaborator and partner Julia Holter (whose own brilliant album Wada appeared on earlier this year). Holter’s wordless vocals and the song’s noticeable structure lull us into believing that we are hearing something pop-adjacent, but Wada’s compositional skill draws us further in and allows for multiple interpretations.
There is an exultant air to much of the album. Part of that is due to Holter’s vocal contributions, but it also has something to do with the way that Wada composes seemingly without an end-point in sight. Each finished piece declares itself as a song and simultaneously undermines that definition. The squeal of Ezra Buchla’s viola provides a link to Wada’s DIY minimalist roots, while the harpsichord-like keys and Corey Fogel’s crashing percussion on Grand Trine seem to stretch into both past and future. Calling wanders by on a delicate keyboard melody, finding its footing in the world with the help of Holter’s quietly expressive vocals. Revealed Night begins as an urban landscape before transitioning into something much more dreamlike: the emergency siren that runs through the piece passes at some imperceptible point through the boundary between real and symbolic. It starts as a call for help, perhaps, and then becomes the pulse of life.
Pulses – the sonic representations of peaks and troughs – are all over this album. Sometimes, they are built into the architecture of a single song, as on Asleep to the World, which consists of eight brief sections, rising and falling like tides. Are they the stages of sleep, of a human life, or of something immeasurably bigger? Aeons seem to pass in this music. Ideas sprout up and are destroyed like civilisations, and yet that seems like too grandiose a way of describing something that is so obviously personal, so open and intimate. Subaru, with its warped, tottering minimalism, seems to take the idea of steady progress and intentionally put stumbling blocks in the way, but only because that is an echo of life and of personal experience.
And even the album’s most out-there moments sound intimate. Flame of Perfect Form sets psychy viola and free-form drums over an insistent drone, but a sweetness of melody emerges with Holter’s singing, and the whole thing feels warm, bodily and strangely comforting. Under the Earth is menacing and sinister at first, but even here, the implication is of harm being kept at arm’s length. Wildness and danger are recognised – embraced, even – but the ideals of protection and love are never far from the surface. Time of Birds is the album’s complex beating heart and, at times, a seemingly sandblasted wasteland of sound. An ever-evolving centrepiece, it encapsulates Wada’s ability to reconcile opposing sonic forces without diminishing the power on either side.
This ability is especially evident on Plume, where the quickfire stream of keyboard notes (like some kind of futuristic songbird) and underlying ambience sit perfectly well together, albeit with an intriguing tension, while the closing track, This World’s Beauty, gives the album the feel of a complete – or almost complete – circle. There is an overwhelming sense of different elements being drawn together, a sense of new beginnings and of play in its most serious form. With What Is Not Strange? Tashi Wada has announced himself as a truly distinctive voice, capable of creating experimental music on the most human level.
What Is Not Strange? (7th June 2024) RVNG Intl.
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