Review Summary: Tentenko XVIII: Sushi, kidnap, Laika
Tentenko is an ex-idol freelance artist who runs her own label and has released an extensive range of experimental pop and techno EPs. This review is part of an ongoing series dedicated to exploring her discography. For a point of reference and orientation to her discography as a whole, please see the first instalment in the series, the review for Good Bye, Good Girl.
Introduction to Tenkibashira
This is a strange one. We’ve been churning through Tentenko’s Tenten Records CD-Rs like they’re yesterday’s pudding and we’re on the peckish end of a blaze haze, an approach largely warranted given the level of development and substance in many of them. Things were getting a little dull, we were a little too deep into the territory of “Yes okay Tentenko, we get it, now eat your damn sushi - the rest of us have finished!” Only, at this point we - whoever we may be - would look down at our plates and realise that we had not, in fact, finished: out of nowhere a new, fresh piece of sushi has appeared. Its filling is ambiguous, its aura grave, and its name?
Tenkibashira. Everyone double takes as Tentenko giggles silently behind her hand. Is this for real? How did she pull this on us? What is this? Well…uh, yes.
Tenkibashira Part I: What Is A Tenkibashira And Where Can I Get One?
Tenkibashira elicits pause for thought like no Tentenko release since
Dokusai or maybe
Tabekko Land. It’s a little fiddly to explain with reference to other parts of the Tentenkoverse, and - unusually - it’s sufficiently well executed that reductive explanations of this kind would do it a disservice in a way that hasn’t applied for many of her other endeavours (looking at you,
A E I O U and
Aka to Kuro). On the face of it, it’s a revival of
Hibiya Koen’s minimal techno with a much more atmospheric focus: roughly adequate as a one-line explanation, but it doesn’t pin down exactly what makes this one so bizarrely intriguing. So begins our investigation: just what is
Tenkibashira and what has it done to deserve such unexpectedly adorable artwork?
Let’s start at the top, with the title 天気柱. You will see this misspelt across the net as
Tenki Hashira, but my angel of a Japanese teacher has reliably informed me that
Tenkibashira is on the money. It also isn’t a real word, roughly translating as Weather Pole (cheers, Kaori) but not in a sense that anyone would ever use in conversation. However, don’t let this stop you from raising your fist in scorn at some schmuck who didn’t learn their rendaku if you ever find yourself unfortunate enough to see the words
Tenki Hashira plastered across your screen.
This may seem like one for the pedants, but it’s actually a fairly helpful reflection of the album’s wider trend for little details to go a long way. You don’t need to have followed the whole series to get a whiff of exactly how unusual this is for Tentenko; almost all her work, whether atmospheric or immediate, is painted in broad strokes, with simple arrangements and economic compositions that play out as though she had dipped her toes into whichever style and then put further development on hold as soon as they got soggy. Not so here.
Tenkibashira is austere and deadpan, but Tentenko fleshes out its minimalistic foundations with a far more nuanced range of glitches than her usual fare, almost as though she had relistened to
Angel Noise and applied everything she learned from Mikawa’s contributions on that album. As such,
Tenkibashira is stylistically monotonous but engaging and subtle in a way that feels more than a little significant for Tentenko at this point. This is a worthwhile preliminary assessment, but its in-depth particularities and bearing on Tentenko more widely have more to unpack. For this, I reasoned, we would need the help of an expert…
You can find Tenkibashira for sale on Tentenko’s webstore or behind closed doors in shadowy, sticky parts of the internet. This album is immune to Soulseek.
Tenkibashira Part II: What On Earth Happened To MiloRuggles?
After I get
Tenkibashira into my headspace and resolve to plumb its depths, things took a turn for the worse. I get in touch with Sputnik user MiloRuggles, my confidante and notorious pryer-opener of secrets typically closely guarded by your neighbourhood mob of fuzzy children (looking at you, Deathspell Omega gang!) - if anyone could help me get to the bottom of this one, it would be him. We arrange to meet for lunch at a place we cannot easily be overheard, as is our practice. The sardines are grilled and delicious; the chef is deaf. It’s a dependable arrangement. But not today. Something’s off. I wait an hour, Milo doesn’t show. My instincts scream to get out of there, but I wait another hour out of courtesy and lack of a better lunch joint. An hour from then I’m in front of his back door. The front door is gone. I knock, no answer. Oh no.
I kick down the door, which flies off its hinges with ostensible relief - freedom at last! - and once my eyes pierce the half-light I see no Milo, but rather a pool of pearly (?!) vomit the size of a quite small lake, on the surface of which floats a handful of handwritten pages recently penned and torn from a diary with minimal notice, or so my intuition tells me. Rats! Where could he be? I skim the vomit off the underside of the paper and skimread the content. My worst fears are confirmed: preliminary analysis of
Tenkibashira together with his preconceptions going in. Damn you Tentenko, is there no end to this madness? I steel myself. Let’s see if I can decode what Milo had to say on this monster:
the idol scene […] is so far removed from the kind of music that I fuck with that even somebody as endlessly desperate as me for a drink and a root wouldn’t wine - let alone dine - a person with even vague connections to the image-based business model
I shiver. Doesn’t sound like he came willingly.
Yet, I gather that nothing makes Johnny’s kimono crustier than those dreams wherein he/s the meat in a humid, sweaty, fleshy sandwich with Toby Driver and Aaron Turner, and I’ll be goddamned if I wouldn’t pump a gallon of gravy into that tasty love-pretzel. So here I find myself, obliged to dim the lights, pop my headphones on, crack a tub of Vaseline, and see where an intimate evening with Tentenko takes me.
Oh God, so this is
my fault? Guilt surges up through my stomach and adds itself to the regurgitation reservoir that has set up shop in the middle of poor Milo’s living room. I read on.
suffice it to say that I expected extremity in one form or another on this EP, and that turns out to have been a mistake […] I now have to rewire my brain to make sense of something that I didn’t expect from this release: subtlety.
So it seems we both arrived at the same conclusion. Interesting. Let’s see where he goes with it, and if this holds any clues to how I might escape to same fate:
Tenkibashira is bookended by two fun little fuckarounds, and the body of music that lies between ebbs and flows between shy, withdrawn electro and half-drawn electronic soundscapes that feel a touch improvisational. It’s a couple of experiments at once, with equal parts highs and lows in each direction it pulls. It feels a bit gun-shy, but that kind of works to its advantage as my expectation of extremes makes this middleground an eerie, intriguing place to be.
My eyebrows shoot up.
Shy is an interesting way to put this one; I’d heard it as aggressively deadpan; monotone with a few dashes of noise precisely placed for good measure;
Hibiya Koen’s brutalism revisited, toned down and draped in occasional unmelodic sparkle. The second and third tracks “Tameike, Fukidamari” and “Sora no Ana” capture this particularly well, downbeat yet uncompromising, so happenstance in their noisiness that they end up laconic. Glancing at the last part of the foul-smelling diary entry, this aspect makes a lot of sense in regard to Milo’s assessment; this album seems to be unusually and intriguingly content to traipse around its own drab qualities. There’s too much going on here for it to fall into the same stew as the “Tentenko, no!” no-starter album
Hito no Ito Nami, yet it has a certain amount in common structurally. Here, there’s just enough development for these tracks to feel as though they
might go somewhere, even if they largely do not. Some of them are obsessively stagnant: the twin slowburners “Kaigan de Hirotta Kaseki” and “Sekitan no Fukuru” churn through the same rhythms and impassive basslines with the most minor, slowly developed variations conceivable for tracks that can be credited with development in the first place. That feeling of improvisation is somewhat present here, but if this is the case then Tentenko is damn conservative as an improvisor.
Perhaps what I took for an assertive decision regarding the album’s semi-extreme greyscale sluggishness, Milo took for evasive writing. This would make a good deal of sense, but why did his perspective result in his apparent dematerialisation from the earthly plane while mine has left me as corporeal as ever? I sit in his finest surviving armchair pondering this question, when I absent-mindedly rearrange the diary sheets and see something that changes everything…
Tenkibashira Part III: Thought You Were Over The Worst? What Do I Do With My Tenkibashira?
As I peel two sheets of paper apart, I find a semi-legible paragraph written on the previously inaccessible back of one, saved from the bile soak by the other. I read and my heart fills with dread:
Johnny here has embarked on an odyssey that I can’t help but compare to that poor dog that the Russians sent to space. Indeed, Johnny is our very own Laika, plucked from the filthy gutters of Sputnikmusic, hastily strapped into the Sputnik 2, then crudely flung into space with nothing but a never-ending discography from an obscure Japanese ex-idol for company.
Oh my goodness, how far has this adventure gone, and is it past the point of no return? Held against the near-limbo of much of the Tentenkoverse, of course this album’s relatively ballsy imposition imposition of distorted synth anti-melodies over the most po-faced dead space ambience contrivable would come off as an extremity, an excitement even. Of course anyone expecting extremity or even novelty from this release would be a little miffed if they hadn’t first day tripped to the languid pits of stasis bored into the earth’s musical fibre by the likes of
Dokusai,
Hito no Ito Nami,
Tabekko Land,
Atarashii Asa,
Tentenko no Seimei Daiyakushin…the list goes on. Have these albums brainwashed me? Am I a different person, a different listener having gone through these with a serious(ish) attitude? Has Tentenko desensitised me to the spice, colour, diversity and earnest joy that cuts other music out into such beautiful shapes? Can I ever go back to being blown away by ambitious, expansive and - blast from the past -
emotional music as I used to, or do I share Laika’s one-way ticket to deep space obsolesce. Will all my reviews from now contain sentences such as “This album contains a genuine development and each track has multiple vocal melodies - how remarkable is that?”
After a short but harrowing hysterical fit, I sink my claws into the armrests of Milo’s finest chintz and touch base with my all-destroying foundations of logic and facts. First of all, I’ve discovered a range of amazing and colourful records while combing through Tentenko (see: Recommended Albums and press F for anyone who didn’t make it this far and probably now thinks these bear actual musical relation to
Tenkibashira); my experience of these has, I think, been mercifully unclouded by the wider scheme of tripping through Tentenko. Maybe the Russians fixed Sputnik 2 up with a selection of killer LPs. In any case, I’m going to take my tolerance for Tentenko’s most inane meanderings less as a desensitisation to music in wider sense and more as a case of specific antibodies that keep the Tentenkoverse from driving me insane. Poor, evidently unvaccinated Milo never stood a chance. I wonder what Tentenko is doing with him as I type.
Getting back to sober analysis, the takeaway here remains surprisingly unchanged.
Tenkibashira is one of the stronger entries in Tentenko’s canon and indicates an encouraging level of growth as far as her talents for minimalism and disruption, both of timbre and rhythm, are concerned. It’s a little grating at points; some of this feels wilful and personable as in “Tameike, Fukidamari”, some feels protracted and dull as in “Kaigan de Hirotta Kaseki”, and some lands somewhere in between as in “Sekitan no Fukuru.” As much as this sounds like an uneven listen,
Tenkibashira boasts an impressive tonal unity and overarching atmosphere of slightly prickly cement-like intrigue, supported by its status as one of the most precisely crafted entries in the series so far. You can make your own mind up over whether this comes off as coyly deadpan or gun-shy and fence-sitting, but it gets a wholehearted stamp of approval either way. Now, to track down Milo and start how planning how to one day, maybe, return to Earth!
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https://tentenko.theshop.jp/items/4347763
