Another gem from the lovely Tim Olive, he who favours playing in duo situations with selected partners and always produces great results thereby. On Kanpuu (845 AUDIO 845-20), we hear a steamy session with Kayu Nakada, a fellow from Osaka. I never heard their previous bout which was Entenka and came out in 2021 on Tsss Tapes, but I guess you can’t scrape every pangolin in the bush.
As it turns out, Kayu Nakada is an electrician by trade, hopefully vending many a lightbulb to unsuspecting tourists in the Umeda district. As a musician, he’s one of those old-school circuit-bending types who knows how to meddle with a printed circuit board in various evil ways…we can see why Tim Olive would be drawn like a magnet to such a fellow…when the pair got to the studio in Kobe in late 2021, Nakada had several drum machines of many famous brands in his bag, causing eyebrows to raise among the subway police as he rode to the gig, and not all of these devices were working properly either. His method was to lay bare the circuit boards and begin “patiently calling them to life”, as the press notes inform us, making our man sound like a James Whale Frankenstein or a David Cronenburg Re-Animator of the music-gear emporium…meanwhile, Olive was playing his magnetic pickups, his radio sets, and some pre-recorded (maybe) sounds of a sports event that took place in the area, possibly ice hockey which (as a true Canadian) he can’t live without seeing on a weekly basis.
So there you have it – not a conventional musical instrument in sight, yet our two floating fin-flappers execute their moves with grace, dexterity, and artistic subtlety, as surely as if plucking the delicate strings of an ancient Syrian harp. Not the kind of wild, untamed noise that flattens the local corrugated iron buildings like a hand grenade, but enough non-specific grit and grind to satisfy your lusts for intoxicating boodlery. As ever, the sheer inventiveness and originality of these Olive-related projects always floors me; I don’t think he, or his compadres, have ever settled for a “normal” sound in the last 10 years. Of course, I suppose some of the success could be in the editing and the mixing; just half an hour of solid music and sound here, possibly edited down from much longer sessions. Even so, it means you are the recipient of condensed audio enjoyment as surely as a can of frozen orange concentrate emptied into your maw.
Marc Bell cover art; the 20th release on this label! From 13 September 2022.