Makigami Koichi - Koedarake - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Limited 180gm vinyl LP pressing. Jack's Mannequin is the name of a side project headed by Andrew McMahon, the lead singer of Something Corporate. It is a concept album centered around McMahon's return to California and the demise of a long-standing relationship.

The cover of this features a gradation of color, a subtle but complete infusion of one element into another, an almost imperceptible moment where A becomes B and both become more. And that is one way of thinking about the music in this , a piece composed in the mid-1950s, and a 2018 re-working of that same piece. The original was composed by Kohei Amada and played by an ensemble in which the Japanese traditional instruments koto, sho and taiko fuse perfectly with the Irish harp. The composition itself also melds Amada' s traditional, classical sensibilities and his knowledge of the deepest roots of Japanese music with his appreciation of new developments in both Japanese and Western music. Another element to consider here is the role of Amada' s voice and lyrics, fusing noh and other traditional elements with a modernity foreshadowing the rise of the singer-songwriter, melding high tradition with folk impulses. This theme of gradation and infusion continues in the other piece of music on this , SUGAI KEN' s revision of the original, with it's puzzling amalgamation of analog/digital, acoustic/electric, and performed/programmed, with the various temporal and geographical elements of Amada' s music melted and melded into the 21st century.

The project 'Hotel Zauberberg' arose out of Aki Takase's and Yumi Paul's shared admiration for the writer Thomas Mann. It mostly consists of notated compositions, with some improvised parts as well. Eleven of the eighteen pieces were penned by Aki Takase, another five are collaborations with Ayumi Paul. Additionally, there are adaptations of a Mozart Minuet and a Bach Partita. Aki Takase reacts to the polyphony of the novel with a variety of stylistic elements. She has never been a purist anyway; she's never been shy of contact. She is an avant-gardist drawing on tradition. She's got both claws and finesse. And, most of all, she's got a sense of humor. Aki Takase and Ayumi Paul's first collaboration stands out through it's light-footed intelligence as well as a sense of the abysses of the 'Magic Mountain', which turns into a world-theatre of love, illness and death. Thomas Mann, whose work includes music as a subject in itself as well as a language, would have enjoyed it.