Review Summary: Fascinating techno reconstruction of virtual-haptic dance palace
Of all the musicians to hire for a choreography score, Aoki Takamasa would once have been so far down my list that I’d have excluded him out of courtesy. No shade - the trickling glitches of his early ‘00s work are respectable and occasionally impressive in their own right, adjacent to the likes of Ryoji Ikeda and Nobukazu Takemura and, at their best (see 2002’s
Indigo Rose), just as good. But danceable? Pah - those records were about as far as you can get into ‘pure’ glitch territory before melody and structured rhythm sublimate into freak accidents and you start rubbing shoulders with the likes of Oval and Alva Noto.
Aoki’s career in the long years since has been unpredictable and erratically portentous: his collaboration with Tujiko Noriko on 2005’s
28 produced one of the few glitch-pop masterpieces worthy of
both those qualifiers, but this was a meeting of two masters of highly complementary aesthetics more than a great ’step forward’ for either party. Things changed from there. 2006’s
Parabolica took a particularly jagged stab at microhouse, laying the groundwork for 2013’s
RV8. This was a rather significant record for Aoki, whose rather bass-heavy techno beats gave the impression that he had taken the skeleton of Ryoji Ikeda’s spindly databops and strapped on exactly enough muscle for it to stomp its feet (and do precisely nothing else). The upshot was minimal techno by name and tempo, but violent splintering of bony feet in practice: brittle textures and deep resonance! Aoki Takamasa had finally arrived on the dancefloor and
RV8 might have been hailed as a watershed moment for his oeuvre had he not promptly fucked off for a literal decade, giving the majority of the world ample time and space to forget he was ever there.
Fast-forward to the ’20s, and avant-garde capital-A artiste Hiroaki Umeda brought in Aoki Takamasa for his experimental dance piece
indivisible substance (2022), a multimodal mix of stage performance, installation, VR and online participation that attempts to attempt to ‘choreograph the entire space’ and introduce apparently - plausibly! - ground breaking ‘new dimensions of dance experience’. Tickets were $280 a head, and I am both lost and deeply intrigued as to what exactly those good people paid so much of their good money for. From there,
SOUNDS for IDVSBL_SBSTC (or ‘Sounds for Invisible underscore Substa[n]ce’ as us real-life peasants call this thing whenever we pronounce its name out loud which happens often because we talk about it always and with magnetic charm) -
this bloody album is a ‘re-edited’ version of Aoki’s contributions to Umeda’s whatever-it-was.
Capisci? The really critical thing is that, circumstances of commission be damned, opener “move_1” is an absolutely perfect follow-up to the grooves and glitches Aoki Takamasa was deploying back on
RV8. The interplay between chirping glitch and steady beats is perhaps the most immediately gratifying he’s ever laid down, the irregularity of the former all the more rewarding for the dexterity with which the latter changes its footing. Languorous synth pads loop through shifting waveform oscillations in a show of dramatic tension that has been hitherto absent in Aoki’s past work - the intrigue here is magical and unbroken throughout the song’s nine minutes. It’s a great achievement, meticulous and deliberate in its craft but effortlessly intuitive in its consumption, evocative of all manner of things to the extent that its role as a medium-breaking performance soundtrack just scans as par for the course.
The record’s remaining three tracks make little to no effort to beat “move_1” at its own game: their progressions are murkier, their clash of tones more provocative, and their contingency on the original performance setting far easier to imagine. The ideas at play are certainly engaging, though! “move_2”’s wilfully nebulous repurposing of “move_1”’s ultra-crisp M.O. to denser, stifling ends is exactly succinct enough not to overstay its welcome, and I find something deeply attractive about the way “move_3”’s ambient haze cradles a rigorous succession of rhythms that demand kinetic engagement but resist any regularity - the dance is made and unmade in real time here, and the urge to participate comes surprisingly naturally given the typically alienating contexts the tones in question are usually encountered in.
In contrast, “move_4” is something of a let-down, by no means a ‘bad’ piece but disappointingly interchangeable with the delirious techno soundscapes already charted so thoroughly on
RV8. It shirks a final distinctive statement on a record otherwise ripe with fresh possibilities for rhythm and glitch, playful and
palpable in a way that so much of Aoki Takamasa’s work has previously resisted. As I suspect may have been the case for Umeda’s experimental dance piece, the boundary pushing undertaken here has much less to do with gazing into the avant-void and much more to do with presenting a traditionally cerebral form in a deceptively accessible, artistically permuted guise. This record is full of potential points of engagement for an audience far broader than its niche brief would suggest, and I only hope it has the good fortune to find one.
