End of Winter Party

Electronic music is a medium that inherently appeals to bedroom musos, who, luckily for us are prepared to spend innumerable hours alone perfecting that particular blip or bleep. A self-contained form of expression which, can sometimes give voice to the furious howls of disconnected souls. So it seemed with Ametsub who performed tonight at Shibuya O-Nest's "End of Winter Party". With only a crescent moon slice of face visible, the other side shadowed in hair - even before he sent out his all-out sonic attack - it was clear that he was setting up barriers. Only those tough enough to withstand the unpleasant whines and random blasts of sound are those privileged to be allowed in. A challenge is all very well but isn't music in some part about beauty as well as aggression? This is why Kashiwa Daisuke, who threw loops of piano passages into the the bit-stream, making them ricochet and decay in ways that were heartbreakingly beautiful, stood out from the crowd of electronic artists. His music is at once both aggressive and tender and, for me, created that miraculous state, where you are, for awhile, totally immersed, made transparent as the snowstorm of noise blizzards through you. Shuta Hasunuma with his almost dance music, that suddenly fractured at odd moments, catching you off guard and making you draw breath with awe at his creativity, seemed, unlike Hasunuma, slightly handicapped when he tried to draw in more organic noises - with a live bass and drums.
The most outstanding act of the night came from Shugo Tokumaru who, elfin-faced and barefoot, presented his music unclad of it's usual technological trickery. Stripped down you find that the acoustic version, is indeed the seed for his magical toy-fairground sound (see earlier post for review of ST's style), the musicianship was breathtaking. A close second highlight of the night were Group_Inou (pictured above), a couple of geeky kids straight from a scene of Weird Science, the best description I can give of them is rap accompanied by a mashup of Bach and Eurovision songs played on a Bontempi organ.

BTW the pic isn't mine, mine was too rubbish so I lifted it from their site, gomen.