Review Summary: vignettes on presence.
To describe something as “deeply human” is to invariably walk the line between hyperbole and sentimentality.
It’s a phrase you’ll find in blurbs about the newest A24 film or in the middle of a pretentious album review (
ahem), but it’s also a phrase that I can’t help but coming back to every time I revisit Masakatsu Takagi’s seventy-five minute opus
Kagayaki.
Takagi, most well-known for his composition work on some of Mamoru Hosoda’s biggest films like
Wolf Children and
Mirai, really shows a level of creativity and storytelling on this project that rivals the storytelling of those same films; it’s just as cinematic and sweeping, and the vividness of the interpretive story it tells is as tangible as if it were being projected on a screen.
Combining field-recordings of “slice of life” vignettes and natural sounds, glitch, vocal layering, piano, traditional folk instruments, sampled orchestration, and some top-tier production, Takagi really has mastered the art of immersion.
Take the collection’s centerpiece, the eleven minute long track “Nurse them Make a fire Feed yourself Express your mirth” for example; it begins with a meditative melody on a traditional woodwind instrument which then develops into a full “center of the village during a festival” moment complete with tambourine, white-noise chatter and laughter from random passersby, and a driving piano that crescendos as the festival reaches its height. The festival and all of its presence then dies down, and Takagi seamlessly falls into a warm and rolling piano melody that lasts for a few minutes before fading into sparse notes that are accompanied with field recordings of conversation. The end of the track morphs from a chamber-folk swell into a reprise of some of the earlier melodies found in the track while fading in a recording of a group of kids playing.
While not my favorite track on the record, it’s a great example of what this album sets out to do consistently across its long run time, namely, to bring the listener into many intimate moments with both people and nature using a range of instruments and sounds.
Takagi’s (mostly) warm and bright instrumentation acts as a guide and leads the listener like a shimmering golden thread weaving its way in and out of the abstract and bringing into focus vivid scenes, while his production choices constantly evoke a feeling of being grounded in a particular moment.
It’s in the deliberate way that he mics his acoustic piano, and in the very surgical mixing altogether, where he’s able to make you feel like you’re sharing the same physical space; that you are in the pavilion with the community choir during practice (“Ageha (Gasso)”), or that you you are on the side of a country road catching up with some friends and singing some folk songs (“Tani no Hamabe”). In fact, the former moment with the community choir is one of my favorite parts on the record. The mic is set up in the distance as Takagi leads a choir through vocal warmups. You hear some coughs every now and then, and you begin to hear the choir really coalesce into a single voice. Some horns and woodwinds begin to accompany the swells, and as the choir continues to climb into the upper registers of their voices while the instruments behind them soar, they break into laughter as some of their number falls out of time. It’s such a pure
human moment that I can’t help but feel moved every time I hear it.
I don’t think we’re collectively gifted records like this one often. It’s a collection filled with joy, curiosity, heart, wonder, and above all, a genuine sense of
presence. It endears itself not just through its playful and contemplative melodies, or through its cast of characters that pop up throughout its runtime, but through its synthesis of both of these things; the sounds of the cicadas and kokyū, the musings of an old woman and the piano, the children playing and the tambourines.
Life is happening all around, and to me, that's comforting.
