Ogurusu Norihide - Modern (CD) - Carpark

Ogurusu Norihide’s new album Modern opens with scales of unaccompanied minimalist piano. As you tune your ear, however, you can also hear a light scratching and then a faint beat, which slowly moves to the forefront, becoming louder and louder, until you discover, huh, I coulda done without the beat. Brian Eno likely would’ve left it out. Never mind. The haunting piano work sounds like it could’ve been used in a Kubrick movie.

Though it sounds like ambient music, Norihide’s scene is actually called “Laptop folk,” possibly because we live in the ‘00s and everything has to have it’s own pigeonhole. In the grand and somewhat tired traditions of minimalism, Modern’s cover is a clean white sleeve, and the album’s songs aren’t titled, forcing me to refer to them as numbers. (Actually, I think I’m supposed to refer to the songs by their time lengths, but I’ll use the track numbers just to be difficult.)

Some of Modern’s tracks (2 and 7) are characterized by pleasant stereophonic guitar, while track 5 focuses on meditative keyboards. Track 4 fashions a sharp attack on the ear with ringing feedback. But, it’s void in track 6 that really captures your attention. Music, we all know, is all about the spaces in between the notes, right? Well, on track 6 (OK, 10:05) there's a helluva lot of space, more than ten minutes of it: here a strum, there a handclap; now a pizzicato pluck, then a mosquito cruises through (maybe that was a flute holding a single dwindling note); each sound followed by careful brave stretches of silence.

Norihide is a certified Shinto priest, we’re told, and lives in Kyoto, Japan, so here’s where I’m supposed to declare that his music has a kinda “Zen” quality to it. Well, it does and, all kidding aside, much of its spaciousness really is quite lovely.

Robert Stribley