Underdog (8)
Underdog Edits

Happy Floating is the debut LP of Italian composer, producer and reed player Damian Dalla Torre. Over the course of two years, the Leipzig-based artist recorded 19 musicians in all kinds of places to bring to life his unique blend of Avant Folk and Electronic. With reeds, brass, guitars, bass, drums, mallets, synthesizers, organ and electronics, the album feels like a mindful walk through a flowering meadow, tickling and caressing all at once.

ARTS is glad to present the very first full length work from one of our most unique artists in the roster, after a few records on the label and an impressive impact on the scene, [KRTM] worked on a larger project that aimed to express freely something deeper, and most likely something that was inevitable and that needed to get out into the sun. Despite the format, this is little more than a usual LP, the entire body of work is larger, but essentially presented in a very personal way in each single part of the elements and written tracks, we are glad to give you "It Will Make The World A Better Place", there are not many words that are needed to describe what you are going into, we hope that this piece of art will sign your future as will sign ours.

On steady rise following two sublime singles over the past year—Sagano b/w Haru Wa Akebono and Karakuri b/w Michinoku—Tokyo-based artist Hoshina Anniversary elaborates his eccentric musical point-of-view even further with a debut album for the ESP Institute entitled Jomon. Fourteen tracks stir a melting pot in line with our obsessions, a variety of styles which often stay in their own dedicated lanes while here their trajectories collide in demonstrable fusion. Hoshina gleans borderline absurdist qualities from late Jazz hero Chick Corea (evident in his wild and meticulous keyboard runs), calls upon ancient Japanese instruments, shrines and mythologies, and makes sideways nods to early minimal synth productions, yet all of the above are sifted through some granular equalization, an abstract veil that smooths the skin of Hoshina's mutant creation. A weight of experience pervades throughout, a requisite education in the electronic realm and a deep reverence for Jazz and its masters, and in turn this confidence transfers a sense of ease which leaves us poring over alternative approaches to otherwise familiar tropes. Once this conversation with the music is established, a subliminal push/pull tension toys with us across the length of the album, undulating our sense of space. The tonally rich, dynamic and melodic side of the works present a cool sense of depth but are violently contrasted by a slew of over-saturated punches, and at some point an inevitable alchemy casts these disparate expressions into a haunting monolithic array. Some are glistening and smooth, others are porous and jagged, but all amount to a staunch and cohesive work with the ability to transport listeners to regions unknown.

During the late 2010s, music lovers around the world began obsessively listening to increasingly esoteric albums on Youtube. More often than not, they’d leave the browser on autoplay. This was how Facundo Arena, the composer and producer behind The Kyoto Connection, discovered the technonaturalistic pleasures of Kankyō Ongaku (environmental music), a distinctly Japanese interpretation of European, British and American minimalist composition and ambient music. “It was a kind of algorithmic magic,” he says. Upload by upload, the utopian music of Hiroshi Yoshimura and his 80s Japanese contemporaries transported Facundo back to his childhood. When he was five, his father placed him in karate lessons and began watching martial arts movies with him. From those early experiences, Facundo became fascinated Japanese history, tradition, and culture, particularly that of Kyoto - the cultural capital of Japan. Kankyō Ongaku reminded him of hearing the sounds of Japanese folkloric instruments as a young boy, and suddenly, the way the influence of Japan had manifested in his music made sense. “I had the sensation that for many years, I’d been doing something similar to the style,” he explains. Inspired, Facundo used an iPad and an old Akai cassette deck to record Postcards, his homage to Japanese minimalism and Kankyō Ongaku. By this stage, he was twelve years deep with The Kyoto Connection, the musical project he launched in 2005 in his hometown of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Over that late 2000s and 2010s, Facundo, later on joined by collaborators Rodrigo Trado (drums), Jesica Rubino (violin) and Marian Benitez (vocals, now his wife), released numerous D.I.Y albums. Project by project, they followed the threads between 80s synth-pop, ambient, new age, house, techno and acoustic composition. Postcards introduced The Kyoto Connection to listeners around the world and brought Facundo into our orbit. During Argentina’s covid lockdown, Facundo received a set of soundscapes recorded in Kyoto by the Japanese musician and sound designer Masafumi Komatsu. Over several insular months, he decorated them with synthesisers, samples and subtle rhythms, creating The Kyoto Connection’s next album, The Flower, The Bird and the Mountain to be released via Isle Of Jura offshoot Temples Of Jura.Ostensibly made up of twelve distinct tracks, listening to The Flower, The Bird and the Mountain feels more akin to spending calm, meditative time in twelve specific environments. Although the foundations they rest on are recordings made in geographic locations around Kyoto, Facundo has yet to visit Japan. As a result, the landscapes he paints sit somewhere between fiction and fact, richly pictorial sonic imagination juxtaposed with echoes of reality. Regardless, as his bubbling melodies and glistening synthesisers glide against Masafumi Komatsu's recordings, Facundo guides us into a blissful zone of tranquillity well worth spending time within.

conatala · World Standard - 「麦秋」: Wheat Harvest1982, the season from spring to summer. Two young men in the peak of their youth, eager to immerse themselves in the recording of a single cassette tape.In March of that year, Soichiro Suzuki and Michio Kojima began to claim the group name “World Standard”.The music was produced in a room in Kojima's parents' house in Nishi-Ogikubo, Tokyo, making full use of ping-pong recordings on two cassette decks. With the focus on guitars, mandolin, and ukulele played by Suzuki, Kojima's upright piano, which was placed in a room between Japan across the corridor, was occasionally added. In addition, percussion was recorded using the echoes of the bathroom; toys such as pianica and trumpets, and drums made of cardboard were used as musical instruments.In the background, the sound of the TV and the subtle sounds of everyday life were intentionally mixed into the music. Listening to the delightful performance - Kojima's grandparents, who he lived with, occasionally opened the sliding doors and came to see the boys recording. They would even have lunch together from time to time.As they repeated their recordings while the tape turned, the young men felt like they succeeded in intercepting the soundscapes of the world - like a folklore in a far-off distant country to one corner of the city of Tokyo. They were so excited.In contrast to the techno pop and new wave sensations that swept the musical subcultures of Tokyo in the 80's, the analog and acoustic sounds they played were somewhat nostalgic. Instead of edgy and futuristic synth sounds, they intentionally tried to portray in the sound the scenery captured on the monochrome screen of an old European movie, and the Japanese houses of the 1950s where they were born and raised. They yearned for the landscape on the veranda. D.I.Y. - a time when there was no word for bedroom recording. Suzuki and Kojima dreamed of nostalgic, new, popular music that no one had heard on cassette.This work, "Asagao", is the first cassette work in a series of several demo tapes produced before the debut of "World Standard" (produced by Haruomi Hosono from NON-STANDARD label in 1985). In addition to being distributed among the members' friends, copies of the cassette tapes were sent to NHK-FM “Sound Street” (Tuesday personality: Ryuichi Sakamoto) - a demo tape special that had started broadcasting from the previous year, as well as cassette magazine “TRA” and Alpha/YEN labels who dubbed and passed out about 20 copies of the cassette. The original tape was restored by remastering, without changing the order of the songs at that time, and will be released for the first time on vinyl LP."Asagao" was remastered by Masato Hara. The cover was redesigned by Yu Yokoyama from the original design of the cassette, and all other design work and configurations, including the inserts, are also handled by Yu Yokoyama. Scheduled to be released in September 2020.conatala · World Standard - 「プリマ」: Prima