While You Were Out by Kazumoto Endo, recommended by Terminus
Nice. Endo does a favour by easing us into this record with a bouncy, shuffling, rumble of a sample that extends an invitation to the body to enter this often bodiless music. He also renews that invitation occasionally with some looping samples and beats, whether lifted from pop and disco tracks ('Itabashi Girl') or irregular pulsing ambiences ('Evergreen'). So despite the rather full-on and aggressive sound, there are little anchors for you to catch onto or tap along with.
Other than than that, there are relatively few concessions. Endo's sound is surprisingly monolithic, and for fifty or so minutes he lathers you all over with it. It's grainy, loud, and raw; but it's also shot through with silences. Most of the noise is dressed with a little reverb, allowing these silences to resonate and echo, and actively 'speaking' their soundlessness. It gets old quickly, but is distinctive nonetheless. Actually he pulls off the reverse gambit rather well: those instances where the reverb dries up are some of the best moments on the album (see especially the last three minutes of 'While You Were Out').
There were some great individual tracks here. 'Fear My Kung-Fu!' was awesome by virtue of its unrelenting, escalated power and violence, and 'Night Falls on Ikebukuro' was my favourite for the way silence, vocals, noise, and tone were constantly interfacing. In the final analysis though, this is too tiring for one listen. After the first half-hour, you start to wonder if Endo has anything up his sleeves that he hasn't already pulled out of the bag. ('Scum 'n' Buzz' does pull it back, incidentally.)
Unlike Kites, I really wonder how in control Endo is on this performance. You can hear the way different elements are channeled by his setup into stereo space, which suggests to me that there's a lot going on in the programming that he isn't directly controlling.
To be listed?