Hikarigasashikomu. The title alone is enough to leave you feeling overwhelmed – assuming, that is, you don’t happen to speak Japanese. If you then subject yourself to the eponymous acoustic work released by the producer and painter Takahide Higuchi under his alias Foodman without any warning or guidance, the result can be a very similar sense of being overwhelmed. Footwork, with its snip-snap samples and ‘hack-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-hack’ rhythms, may well be the genre Foodman draws upon for his own music. Yet apart from the fact that it’s a hectic affair, there’s very little you can rely on with this record. You’re thrown into a seething cauldron in which, rather than finely chopped vegetables, samples of speech, sound and who-knows-what else of unknown origin are floating about.
Naturally, these aren’t whole either, but have been broken down into their constituent parts, only to then rain down on you as a jumble of words or a shower of radio frequencies. A very balanced, calm state of mind is recommended to come through the whole thing unscathed. Good old steady, balanced attention can work wonders. Or you could treat the album as a form of meditation, letting things flow through you. That way, you’ll come out of it relatively unscathed in the end. In its excessively schizophrenic way, it’s actually rather brilliant. There’s just one thing that leaves you thoroughly baffled: where on earth does this catchy, laid-back groove in ‘Hard Reclining’ suddenly come from?
Hikarigasashikomu
