Anchorsong
The Lost and Found EP

2.5
average

Review

by Irving EMERITUS
November 28th, 2011 | 15 replies

Release Date: 2011 | Tracklist

Review Summary: Trailing a rising sun.

Artists’ websites often have the tendency of turning up the hyperbole factor when it comes to detailing their parent performer’s musical history. Anchorsong’s (a.k.a. Masaaki Yoshida) is a case in point: the “About” section of his homepage proudly trumpets that he “has become globally recognized for his unique live shows”, which “many people have described as ‘like watching a painter drawing on a white canvas’”. By the time folks read that far they will already have opened additional tabs for SoundCloud on their internet browsers. There’s even a nifty statistic thrown in at the end for good measure: “He has garnered an international following on YouTube, with videos of his performances having been viewed more than 300,000 times so far,” quips the website in a deadpan tone.

While clearly whoever Anchorsong hired to write his background profile page for him hasn’t come within a thousand miles of Justin Bieber’s or Rebecca Black’s own YouTube stats, the Japanese performer does exude a certain wildcard quality that makes him a prospect worth looking out for. Originally from Tokyo, Anchorsong moved to London in late 2007 and has since fashioned a bit of a reputation for himself, having supported the likes of Prefuse 73, DJ Krush, Bonobo, Daedelus, Gonjasufi, and Jaga Jazzist on the European circuit. But while Anchorsong himself is best described as a groove alchemist of considerable eccentricity, his brand of music – a wild fusion of rock, hip hop, and electronica – is unexpectedly deliberate and heavy-handed. While this may have much to do with the fact that every note on The Lost and Found EP – from the sampled beats right through to the strings – is played by the Japanese performer himself, too often does it seem that Anchorsong is unable to utilize the negative spaces that he has created in his work, resulting in a form of auditory prose that rarely rises above the serviceable.

Take EP opener “New Bodies” for instance: while the song itself is sonically taut and driven forward by the sort of finely-crafted keyboard riff that one might expect to find on a Daft Punk outtake from the Tron: Legacy soundtrack, it is quickly enclosed by a heady sense of doggedness and eventually arrives at an all-too-logical conclusion with a rigid, perfunctory air. Second track “The Crossfire” doesn’t fare much better, with its series of disparate shimmers failing to dovetail completely with the metronomic string arrangements heaving and falling in the background. While Anchorsong’s ability to create dense and tightly woven samples is smeared all over the nuts and bolts of this track, there is no sense of occasion to be felt at all, just the humdrum rise and fall of a synthetic sequence going through its paces. Elsewhere, other cuts, like the awkwardly-placed “Prelude” – a blithe forty-seven second piano doodle that is unfathomably placed near the very end of the EP – or the mind-numbingly rudimentary “Into the Frame”, offer precious little in the way of substance or insight into Anchorsong’s songwriting process, making their very inclusion on this EP a questionable artistic decision.

But even if it urgently lacks the sort of creative spark that is often required to catapult a debut effort into widespread international recognition, The Lost and Found EP isn’t patently bad by any stretch of the imagination. If anything, it hints at the possibility of greater things to come from this Japanese performer and, when viewed through that particular prism, deserves to be taken as a promise without commitment. It’s just unfortunate that this time around, Anchorsong’s output is as two dimensional as the metaphorical white canvas that his website purports him to freestyle with.

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Anchorsong The Lost and Found EP

Review

Anchorsong
The Lost and Found EP