Review Summary: Finally, a happy album about the future. Why are musicians so dour?
There exists a poem well known in the free (libre) software movement for its ideological and cultural significance, an excerpt of which follows:
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
That poem was Richard Brautigan's "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", arguably most notable for the foresightfulness of its vision in an era when the overwhelming majority of people had never even ｓｅｅｎ a computer before. Powerful imagery, but relevant how?
Funwari-chan appears to have pulled a page from Brautigan's playbook, because it―she if you prefer―is basically the soundtrack to that poem. Enter Funwari-chan/ふんわりちゃん and
with Funwari-chan!/ふんわりちゃんと一緒！, a walking paradox of derivative originality. The irony of this isn't the real age of Funwari-chan's seemingly novel ideas; even if the poem was the fountainhead of such utopian sentiments that'd still leave us over 60 years to explore and expound on them. The irony is these ideas ARE still novel in music. Indeed, there are moments in the album that sound innovative. How is it that only after more than a half-century our music is only just getting around to exploring the idea of a machine-and-nature synthesis with anything more than dystopic terror? There's only so many Blade Runner/Ghost in the Shell depths for PERTURBATOR et al. to plumb. In contrast, Funwari-chan's pie-in-the-sky optimism is charming, and disarmingly so.
I mention this because context is, of course important, but also because it's much easier to describe the music by its mood than by typical measures of genre and such. There just isn't anything quite like it: it's too organic to be lounge, too lively to be chillwave, too vocal to be ambient, too restrained to be vocaloid, and too much of all the above to be anything resembling pop. I could perhaps call it experimental, but is there any lazier appellation? It's just... ｆｏｒｅｉｇｎ. Foreign and exotic and inscrutable as much as you'd expect from ○ oceans away.
With such eclecticism it's difficult to properly account for the album without falling back on the dreaded reviewing cop-out of song-by-agonizing-song analysis, but I'll endeavour to anyways. From first blush it seems like Funwari-chan wants to be some kind of Thievery Corporation-by-way-of-bubblegum-dreampop with the airy, beats driven opener and follow-up track "modulator girl", which carries the curious distinction of being the only song on a vocaloid album to feature any actual singing from the titular vocaloid. You'd think such an oversight would have been noticed. It effectively sets the expectation for easygoing, downtempo album: think the best of early Starfucker. It's an expectation the rest of the album is only too happy to subvert.
From there it only gets stranger as the music gradually goes tits up in a degeneration to a NIN-esque industrial hell, peaking right at the album's midpoint, and again with the remix closing it. Doesn't sound pleasant, does it? Yet, it is. Somehow it just doesn't lose its innocence. It's like a cute little perpetual music machine that has to scale down for a diagnostic routine, then at the end shutdown for unscheduled maintenance. The last thing you see before the computer powers-off is a little smiley face of Funwari-chan and a not-quite-synthetic .wav file, 「また*〜！」. Funwari-chan will return, but until then we'll just have to settle for a meadow slightly less cybernetic.
If our future is one dominated by Funwari-chan's ilk, then I for one welcome our machine overlords( of loving grace).ふんわりちゃんと一緒に行くぞ
