Do we call Takahiro Mukai prolific now? He’s released eight tapes in
the past two years, among other things, so I think it’s safe to say he’s going
through a creative streak. I’ve even reviewed him on this very blog before. I
know you want to relive his Telly,
Washer & Fridge release on Entertainment
Systems, because we’re all in this together.
The Osaka musician has found a newish home for this release, our old
standby Hylé Tapes (and dang, they’re
the excellent-est). I wrote before about how Mukai’s music would be perfect for
seasick, alternate-gravity-pressure dancefloors (or at least something along
those lines), and he’s proving my intuitions right yet again. This is awesome
dubby-steppy weirdness, if everything was coated in soap bubbles and slowed
down to tub-drain speed. This is dance music for MOMA installations, and it
only gets as fast and crazy as “#236” and “#244” allow it to. (Numbers only for
TM’s song titles.)
Yeah, this is modern art as recognized and configured in sound waves,
and it points to the future. Mukai’s harnessed his synthesizer rig and wrangled
it into an abstract wilderness where East meets West in a psionic global
showdown. He is the MC of the event, and he is only in our minds. We’re on the
brink of total annihilation, and The
Ideal Ruins is the soundtrack piped in from another reality to hasten the
action.
Maybe that’s what he’s insinuating by his title, The Ideal Ruins, that we’re dancing in our reconfigured
postapocalyptic bodies upon the grave of modern civilization. We’re beyond
everything, and this is what’s left. Fortunately, Takahiro Mukai has survived
to make everything a little more pleasant. Or maybe he was never actually here
in the first place.
--Ryan Masteller
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