Japanese Musicians Can Definitely Play their Kitchens
From Shugo Tokumaru to ICHI, Japan seems to have a knack at composing kitchen orchestras
Shugo Tokumaru has subliminally repaired a few bad transistors in our chips for sure. Now we know what Gagaku is. He is the guy who can simply sit on his carpet flower in the middle of his room, start a dream diary around Hachidai Nakamura and compile it into an orchestra out of kitchen utensils. So the first time we heard this oddball harmony of doorbells and fork-knife kisses on “Button” it was already too late to look away. Exit was our favorite album that year and Shugo was our newly-found ecstatic multi-instrumentalist.
Later on, it was such a relief to see the legacy linger on thanks to passionate Tokyo-based labels such as Sweet Dreams Press. In mid-April 2015, they released maru by the Japanese experimental one-man-band ICHI and so we have yet another kitchen symphony of instruments found in daily chores and therefore a handful of new inanimate objects to play with.
“Hippo +47”, opens the album by emptying a water bottle that embraces a beatbox and that is just the prelude to a…
