This charmingly off-kilter pop album by Hiroaki Sugawara – released in 2002 under his alias Sergio Maria Saguaro – pulls off a delicate balancing act. It sounds approachable, smooth, above all deeply relaxed, and yet it is packed with playful surprises. Those moments of deviation ensure that the album’s pronounced chill factor never slides into the arbitrary. Again and again, small details surface that make the ears prick up.
Sugawara draws on a wide range of exotic sonic worlds and fuses them with an aesthetic that sits somewhere between Balearic pop and Japanese city pop: shimmering textures, plucked guitars, gentle percussion. On track three, for instance, a jazz-inflected bassline suddenly emerges from what is otherwise a largely gamelan-like pattern of chiming rhythms. And on »Field«, the memorable melody takes its time, slowly peeling itself out of an electrostatic haze of ambient noise. For Rain Guitar, the term lucky dip might well have been invented.
