Orange Vinyl
Followers of the long-running Japan Blues show on NTS will be well familiar Howard Williams archivalist-like interest in Japanese music tradition, and it's an approach that he's also capable of transmutating into his own sounds. On this second album under the Japan Blues moniker, and first for Demdike Stare's DDS imprint (a highly appropriate home, may i add) and one on which he is also joined by London producer the Dengie Hundred, his processes are more engaging and far-reaching than ever. For what of a better word, those processes are mostly collagistic, weaving and layering field recordings made in Japan with his own recordings made back in the UK with singers Akari Mochizuki and Tamani Pearl, alongside Hibiki Ichikawa, the only professional Tsugaru shamisen player in Europe. There's a dream logic to such compositions, the three long form pieces drifting through various phases that suggest the intersection of memory and experience, and the insurmountable gap between the two. It plays something akin to a meeting of Jon Hassell and The Threshold Houseboys Choir, a confluence of sound of often indeterminate origin, sent from an indefinable past. Freud claimed that memory has no guarantees at all, and it's on that precipice of understanding that Japan Blues Meets the Dengie Hundred appears to balance itself.
