Review Summary: Zany daydream queen at the peak of her powers
Tujiko Noriko’s story is the kind of thing you can recount in one breath while conserving the best part of its character:
zany Japanese girl moves to Paris and lives out an arthouse daydream, cult classic records and indie films galore. Easy headline, happy days. Her output, on the other hand, takes a little patience. She’s a master at conveying a wealth of personality with inscrutable or even perplexing delivery: her interviews are deadpan and often hilarious, but they’re unlikely to make you laugh out loud; her music is adventurous and often beautiful, but it rarely lays on the kind of gratification that will nudge your jaw downwards. Her art-pop vision disregards flash-points or climaxes, frugal in its hooks to begin with; her motifs are languorous and her progressions slow. Her experimentalism is less concerted Boldness and more a tangential follow-on from her leisurely authenticity, which, shock of all horrors, takes a little warming up to. Good luck! The full effect is warm and distant and wry and somehow very much ample - and if it isn’t, that’s between you and
your art-pop vision, may curses forever fall upon it.
So it goes for
Hard ni Sasete, (probably) the strongest album in Tujiko’s solo canon. With her laconic take on glitch, indietronica and art-pop blueprinted on 2001’s
Shoujo Toshi, a record full of tentative first steps,
Hard ni Sasete saw her expand her style with growing confidence and diminishing restraint. This is a record
full of liberties, excesses and deficiencies, though this applies more to the lengths to which individual ideas are stretched and the textural particularities of her sound palette than any sense of too much happening too fast. As such, song structures are frequently elongated to the point of non-existence, with correspondingly loose arrangements: the opener “Shore Angel” starts at the deep end, a nauseous weave of reverb and reverse, eerie vocalises and synths modulated beyond the reach of unified melodies. It’s an instant litmus test for those who will jive with the album’s loose attitude to structure and dense aesthetic, and appropriately so: its level of formlessness may be unmatched by anything save for the limbo episode “Mugen Ressha”, but it’s an important introduction to how Tujiko’s arrangements get so sucked into their own reverie that their parameters vanish into empty space.
To that end, closer “Umi” is one of the most approachable cuts, boiling down the album’s convoluted layerings into a single languid guitar track and winding vocal line. It has no particular direction and goes on for what might as well be forever, but there’s something tranquil in its meandering that offers an appropriate moment of release after so many translucent soundscapes. Tujiko’s zany manner treads such a fine line between blithe deadpan and lethargic stupor that she occasionally erases the gap entirely, yet “Umi'' encapsulates that evasive, gorgeous
something that adds such charm to her ambiguous disposition. This grounds the album far more than any songwriting technique or compositional choices;
Hard ni Saseteis the kind of record where you have to sniff out some sense of character to appreciate the choices being made, but Tujiko is almost willfully obtuse about conveying this for the most part. “Umi” is the most obvious point where she stops teasing and distorting, and gives her audience something pure to reckon with; no surprise that it comes right at the end.
Hard ni Sasete also boasts a handful of acutely focused moments: “Sen (Call My Name)”’s tail end is an ambient pop masterclass, quavering synthlines shifting their weight so slowly over so many palpable heartbeats that it’s a fool’s errand to second guess where they want to carry themselves, while “Karappo” draws on a driving pulse and heavier beats with disarming intensity, tender vocals rendered urgent by cathartic instrumental fission. Though worlds apart in their tone and form, these tracks both evoke something equal parts tense and beautiful, the same spirit heard in “Umi” straining against more robust confines and arrangements active enough to clash some textures against others. The near-epic “Penguin” starts off as a similar story in this respect, but Tujiko cuts enough structural slack for its churning glitch to work itself into something more hypnotic, practically soothing by the time it starts unravelling in the song’s closing minutes. It pays to be protracted if you’re aiming to tease hidden qualities out of single ideas, and these three tracks’ keen’ focus shields this from panning out as anything cumbersome, affording them an inviting instant-highlight quality that their counterparts largely evade.
You’ll have to get acquainted with the whims of Tujiko’s imagination (or, y’know, touch base with your own) for the album’s appeal not to end there, but there’s great joy to be had in embracing the way it runs by its own logic. It takes a lot to its stride as such: these structures and textures may be forward-thinking, but Tujiko’s tones and techniques often border on cheapness. Were the atmosphere one iota less compelling, it’d be a fatal immersion-breaker to count the number of liminal reverse effects, or weigh up the degree to which “glitch” elements are crafted out of repeating intersections between loops rather than true one-off alterations to the rhythm, for instance. This may sound particularly dated now, but I feel
Hard ni Sasete’s adventurousness has always stemmed as much because of as in spite of its means; it’s rare to find music at once this rich and this blithe in its disregard for established technical, compositional, or production wisdom.
This is part of why it’s so jiving that she, along with every other vaguely distinctive female voice in art-pop, is associated so incessantly with Bjork, whose proficiency and solo success were practically destined from years of classical instruction from an early age, a popular precursor band and fraternisation with the best producers in trip-hop. Tujiko was her own entity from the word go; untrained, unestablished and independent, but even when her work is at its muddiest or most meandering, it always belies a sense that no amount of impurity could distort the oddball beauty of her vision. There's humour in that title:
Hard ni Sasete. Make Me Hard: what a ridiculously unlikely pairing for a collection of songs this nebulous. And yet there is something hard behind all that, a tangible presence supporting those unhummable melodies and daydream-lyrics. Go find her: it’s not
just a tease.
