Review Summary: places and people and life and everything
Music is a time and a place, a then and a there. Notation and theory mean rather little weighed against all the people you’ve known, the places you’ve been, and the songs you took with you. The things you bring with you shape the things you take away. I owe as much to my favourite albums as I do to the person I was when I first heard them, and to the people I’ve shared them with. Music isn’t actually music. We are.
Omusuhi - a two hour smattering of new-age hued classical, japanese folk music and field recordings - seems to revel in that idea: in time and place, in then and there, in the moment, and that which they impart on the art that we love. Songs and melodies are reworked & reframed & revisited, often with little difference in the notes and their placement, the change conjured by context. The bustle of a Guatemalan cafe(?) circa 2002 soaks opener “Light Song” in an air of hopeful determination, the out-of-tune piano spluttering out its notes to a chaotic, unlistening environment. When the song loops back around for a second time, the cafe is gone, as is the piano. Time and place change, as a harmonica(?) wheezes out the melody instead, rather uncomfortably, the recording scratchy and strained. It feels at an end, giving up, but it won’t. Third, forth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth(!) reprisals of the song come and go, from the metro of Atlanta to the markets of Istanbul, each shifting the backdrop and revealing more of the melody, the differences themselves unpacking the meaning, suggesting the intent, adding to the heart and spirit of it all. Some versions are goofy, others are quaint. There’s laughter and birdsong, keys are rarely complied with, silliness ensues regularly, and it’s all really quite lovely, each exploration of the tune unique and its own, yet all part of the same. Only with rendition ten, though - the album's closer and revealingly titled “Light Song (first demo, 1999)” - are you invited to glimpse the original. Here, there is no discernible environment, just Takagi and his piano, alone. It feels lonely - the hustle and bustle, and the rich personality that it lent, absent - yet also so intimate. With no context to guide the way, all the warmth and character is owed entirely to Takagi’s presence, the melody his own, vulnerable and unadorned. It’s enough to take your breath away.
As a structuring tool, I adore it, the iterative device lending the journey an explorative air. It’s like you’re peeling back layers of a myth, cosying up within the folklore, the song unfurling over time, becoming
more as you become one with it. As the question marks above allude to, you’re still never entirely sure of what/where/when you’re listening to, certain only that you wish you were there. A dream-like haze spreads across the record, consequently, for it’s not just the shades of “Light Song” that you’re having to piece together. There are three versions of “Niyodo”, three more of “Kaze Kogi”, a smattering of “Nijiko” and the occasional “Odori” and “Tamame”, each floating about amidst a sea of unique pieces. You feel like you’ve been there before, only you haven’t, only you have! The lighting is different. The smells aren’t the same. You know them, though. Nostalgic and warm, home-cooked and welcoming, Takagi spins his rejuvenating merry-go-round, a heady kaleidoscope, refracting places and people and life and love.
It’s a quiet celebration of the little things, the act of making time, elevating the there and then above all else. By the end of it you feel you’ve gone somewhere, experienced something, engaged in the sprawling impossibility of life, the universe and everything. Whether the first and final “Light Song” is truly the original, the definitive, the
one, becomes irrelevant. It transcends notation and theory. It is the people touched, the places seen, and the stories told. It’s where you take it. It’s who you share it with. That’s what music is. That’s what matters.
