(2019) Kukangendai - Palm


Review:
The music that listeners will encounter on this album stands apart from Kukangendai’s past offerings. The six compositions comprising Palm have come a long way from the genetically mutated Japanese alt-rock of the band’s earliest days; from the ambitious excursions embarked upon by the second album, which sought to translate the rhythmical structures of electronic genres, such as glitch, dubstep and footwork, to be played by a 3-piece setup; from their formidable experiments (an outgrowth of the prior excursions) involving cutting up their repertoire into shorter segments, from which they would refashion megamixes to fit the run-times of their live outings; and, indeed, from the organic fusion with rap and hip hop that was the collaboration album with Moe and ghosts. Accordingly, when I stated that Palm sounds like Morse code signals, and posited figuratively that they were coded messages, I was insinuating a certain yearning to decode. And indeed, these sounds actively reach out to listeners. Go on, read us if you can, they say to us. Welcome to this singular experience wherein the passive process of listening and the active process of decryption are one and the same. All in all, Kukangendai’s latest strongly calls for focused and recurrent listening in a way wholly different to other, more conventional music. Playing Palm involves at once reading, and being read by, its six tracks. It offers the unique sensation of being scanned by music – of decoding music and being encoded by music. I should add that this is of course a physical experience too. After all, these compositions will likely be performed live; some of the tracks are even danceable, though the dance they inspire may not resemble any that we have danced before (for instance, if the footwork genre constituted an attempt to tame complex systems into simplicity, then Kukangendai might be said to be demonstrating the opposite).


Tracklist:
01 - Singou
02 - Mure
03 - Menomae
04 - Hi-Vision
05 - Sougei
06 - Chigaukoto wo Kangaeyo


Media Report:
Genre: post-rock
Source: CD
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits