I don't know what's going on. I first am not very proficient in Japanese, not nearly enough to make sense of stuff on a regular basis. So I do the only thing you can do: GOOGLE TRANSLATE. Right? And then with a little bit of common sense jigging around and searching specific kanji for their individual meanings and trying to put them together… only in some cases where Google Translate makes literally no sense at all… sometimes it's worth this extra effort. More often than not I end up getting lost in a world of language.
This time I somehow ended up on a blog that had written quite an extensive article on the depiction of cannibalism in comics and I feel really disgusted now, why did I keep scrolling down? Yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck.
Anyway: language. 天才子役の息子の気持ちD is the name of the artist in this instance. It means something like "Feelings of genius child actor son, D" – they're from Uchisaiwaichō (neighbourhood in Chiyoda, Tokyo) and they make music. Minimal, experimental, beat-focused music. In fact, their most recent EP is composed entirely of drums. 真海雷巻 is the EP title. All the tracks are named after various water-based creatures: shrimp, common octopus, snakehead, and this track I'm sharing, 「巻貝」 (conch).
It begins life as a metallic tin can rainstick rattle, which leads into a swaying, head-noddingly regulated beat, with vacuum cleaner sounds supporting abrasive velcro snares that also sport spray can ornamentations throughout – these grow more prominent, as they were at the beginning, towards the end, neatly tying up the soundscape with an ouroboros of noise. Wheezy miniature bellows flap around like a thin watercolour of rhythmic turntablism, joining two notes of some miniature bongo thing for the only "melodic" sounds of the track, and then there's these tiny rolling tom sounds.
All of it adds up to a delightful almost-two-minutes' worth of percussive crunch and crackle, thump and fizz, a container of organic, naturalistic beats that shows a sensitivity to the natural world, and a desire to rhythmicise that world in short drum-based vignettes.
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