Partefacts – Time Travel
Can computers be funky? How could they not be? All modern music is computer-assisted in one way or another. Yes, it is true that long ago, in the dust of the past, funk and rock seemed like art forms that only special human beings could be the secrets of.
In fact, electronic music was often ridiculed by rock purists. Unless there was a bloke sweating over a guitar it couldn’t be much good, they reasoned. Also, back when few really had any idea about the way synth sounds are produced, many imagined that electronic groups merely trained their computers to create music, while the band members themselves were out enjoying lunch.
Modern music is computer-assisted and has to be funky. The future has been here for a while, and it doesn’t quite excite us anymore. As Partefacts might claim “Time Travel feels better the first time“. The German group’s excellent single feels like the work of a new-wave band that’s been afforded the opportunity to visit the future, played a few gigs there and returned disillusioned. Their sound is funky, but tense, the perfect expression of pop music right now.
Ayane Yamazaki – Phase
There’s that old bit Holden Caulfield says about reading a book that has so much warmth that you immediately feel like you want to ring the writer up. That is to say that some modern works of art have the ability to speak to us, and many others, on such an intimate level that we can’t help but feel as if we are interacting with something created specifically for us.
Few modern novelists are more popular or prized than Japanese writers. Having read my fair share of these writers’ work I feel that Caulfield’s remark continues to work, albeit not exactly in the same terms. Their works as, similarly, with a lot of art made in Japan, makes you feel awe, and makes you want to get to know these people, realizing full well that you are unlikely to ever truly know them or befriend them in the true sense of the word.
Ayane Yamazaki’ Phase is an innocent and awkward song. It sounds like the work of someone that has been playing various arrangements of this tune in their head for many, many long hours. The result is a universal kind of pop sound that, still, seems to reveal little about Yamazaki herself. It’s the silent friend you never learn the name of.
