The joy of LEGOs, or Tinker Toys, or even a hefty knapsack full of wooden blocks comes not necessarily from the patient assembly of things based on a blueprint but the thrill of dumping the contents all over the floor (if you never did this, raid your kid's/nephew's/cousin's room and do so, now). From the height of, say, the top of a bunk bed, the sound is cacophonous; the scattered chaos of colors, shapes, reverberations and impending parental discipline that come upon impact is immediate, primal, thrilling.
Drummers Muneomi Senju (Boredoms) and Tatsuhisa Yamamoto (Natsumen) are grown men, but they continue to make careers out of this turbulent aesthetic, now as a tenuous duo on A Thousand Mountains (a title that might even allude to the Thousand Buddha Mountain, a god-controlled range known to hurl itself through space). With each work, they inhale, roll tape and expel a high-strung stream of hand-twisting acrobatics fired from acoustic and synthetic kits, electronics and occasional editing; you can imagine the engineer pausing "no, not yet" as Senju and Yamamoto lurch forward "now, let's go!" "Chronoscope Fatigue" spills forth like a domino-toppling world record, the drummers expeditiously pounding out a polyrhythmic tom-tom display as deft as any Gene Krupa solo. They abruptly switch styles with the brief "Foggy in Aquarium", hinging a mélange of metal strikes to a thunderous, far-flung dub snare. "Scattered Devils", on the other hand, works in the chopped and re-appropriated designs of artists such as Squarepusher and breakcore extraordinaire Enduser, remixer Takuma Watanabe turning the original source into distorted belches and panning scratches while injecting the tempo-jumping piece with shrieks, bleeps and a funk-like Rhodes coda. Moving with grace and lightning speed across cymbals, wood chimes, bongos and temple blocks, the duo achieves a ruminant, swelling calm with "Correspon-Dance" before perching on a steady, nervous seven-minute snare roll - eventually underscored with shimmering crashes and caliginous gong tones - on "Fricative Lights".
Despite the high caliber sonic purgation and potentially overwhelming nature of the project, the duo's orchestration and deft performance (and wonderful mixing job) ensures an impressive textural clarity, allowing the listener to marvel at the myriad dynamic contrasts between organic and anodic, and the beauty of whatever is bashed, smacked, dropped and processed. Muscular pandemonium rarely sounded so sweet.<
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Dave Madden 2010-02-13
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