Review Summary: Alphabets and puke rainbows
Expectations are funny. Yukika 3 Sleepyneko RABU Neko is also funny. Yukika [3] is some anime girl who might also be a person, and she(?) has graduated from some (potentially) Japanese rando's bedroom to the bowels of the Band Camp. She has zero traceable social media and, eyeball-terminatingly awful artwork aside, presents her art in such an incredibly vague way, probably beyond the point of blandness. This is somehow hilarious, in a deeply deadpan e-humour way. Is this a coincidence? Is she real? Let’s work on the assumption she is, because it’s funnier that way. Her project is dweeby bedroom techno loosely comparable to the archlady of reverb-beat purgatory herself, Tentenko. The difference is that Tentenko somehow sustains an active fancircle and draws a healthy profit from her work. Yukika 3 has zero presence and charges 102 yen a download. That’s like one can of cola. Visionary.
Let’s talk about the music on her EP
Mudai Yukika (Untitled Yukika). It is whack. We will go through swiftly and thoroughly; commence. Opener “i am yukika” is a fascinating statement of identity because it tells us next to nothing about its creator, while trotting out the same evasive pseudo-darkwave emulation of atmosphere that cut out
Machi-era Tentenko as actually pretty decent. It is a beginning. Next up, “雪*DISCO” (Yukika DISCO) is a legitimately hooky mid-tempo dance track, featuring a two-note bassline that loops for literally the entire song. This is an accurate reflection of the arrangement standard across the whole albumthing. It also includes a distorted spoken word bridge credited to “yukika's friend”. Cool. “怖い猫” (Scary Cat) is a vaguely creepy airspace that will just about still exist in the world when you’re done hearing it, and “可愛い猫” (Cute Cat) is a disgusting candystain of synthesised rainbow violence that volte-faces midway into a thumbless vaporware cover of your favourite drippy anime OST, or whatever bit in Nier made you cry third hardest. We are over halfway.
“*оссийская Федерация” (Russia) does some kind of breakcore piano shit that sounds like The Prodigy braining themselves to Swan Lake in an empty cabaret venue. “久しぶり” (Been A While) is a my-first-ambient song similar to the slurry Loathe dropped last week, but twice as good because it 1) is under three minutes, 2) sounds like an underfunded video game winddown, and 3) never demands that you take it anything close to seriously. Good moves, Yuk3ka. Finally, the closer “NAGANO SHINE SNOW (live ve)” [sic] is an egregiously repetitive glitch banger that boasts low enough production value and enough natural reverb that will few will be in any doubt over the latter part of its title. This is all of it. There are seven songs on this release. They are a revolution in jank. Virtually no-one will ever hear them.
This all sounds like a royal crock of shite, and it
kinda absolutely is, but the flagrant disjunction between these tracks and the glorious fucking amateurism of the whole thing is fascinating on a level inannexable to most musicians. Most individual elements here set new standards of unremarkable for themselves, but there’s something miraculous about the way this release pivots between, say, ambient computerbreath and dysfunctional breakbeat
while still sounding like the most inoffensive thing you will ever hear this week. Either there’s some mysterious artistic unity going on here, or Yukika Three has hit a plane of mediocrity so profound that things as ephemeral as stylistic disparity have lost all meaning for her. Hats off, either way. The record also sets a high bar for alphabet novelty; in a world without copy/paste, you would need a total of four keyboard overlays to upload its tracklist to your database (thank you neekafat for undertaking this for the good people or Sputnik) - so that’s great! All things considered, this is almost a fun EP. I am now following Yukika 3. Maybe she has a future.
