Obanikeshi by Koeosaeme

Koeosaeme | Obanikeshi
Orange Milk Recordings (LP/DL)

Obanikeshi is the second album by the Japanese artist Ryu Yoshizawa (AKA Koeosaeme) released by Orange Milk Records. Thirteen short tracks featuring light speed electronic patchworks, glossy synthetic sounds and plastic pastel-neon, transparent noises. Like a digital machine gun, track after track, the artist fires out laser grains, bits of voices, crackle dust, and shapes with enviable skills and awareness an unreal landscape of hyper hi-fi multi-dimensional objects. This might feel confusing at first listen, but acquires absolute sense in the broader picture.

Long blades of synthetic pads cut through the mesh of voices, concrete noises and sometimes traditional instruments, providing a sense of suspension that lasts long enough just to give us breath and to collapse again into itself. Distorted frequencies and glitches occupy the higher end of the spectrum constantly, resulting into a very tall and incredibly detailed sound picture, always prone to expansion.

Yet, the overall sense of the album is that of an overwhelming claustrophobic experience, where the beautiful, distal space we perceive in the background feels beyond our reach as the gestural elements come touching, grasping and hitting from every possible direction with no rest nor mercy. While the twisted aggressiveness of the extreme cut ups and fast looping – that resemble some of the earlier works of Rudolf Eb.er – is perhaps the key element of the whole album, it is performed taking into account an aesthetic idea of beauty that feels up to date and perfect in its formal quality. Some of the sounds used in Obanikeshi might in fact recall some of the more canonically employed  features of the sound developed by artists such as Visible Cloaks and Arca, resulting in a polished aesthetic-devastation of classical digital beauty.