Those that feel they might fancy a fractured stopover far east of, say, Schematic, or maybe Chocolate Industries, be warned, as, like some hyper J-pop wind-up pup, the unrelenting rough and tumble of Zaumi ’s errorist activity may prove ultimately too wearing for all but the most intrepid avant-idm enthusiast.
[Listen] Zaumi is Kyoto electronic error-ist Higuchi Eitaro’s first registration on the radar, though he’s apparently been operating under the Dagshenma alias since the early ’00s, associated, for those with a need to know, with the satanicpornocultshop collective and the Neji label. A dinky 3” in transparent mini-dvd-case from Elecroton, whose in-house style, documented in coverage of previous releases by head Ton-meister Martin Weiss and sidekick Soltau, makes it a shoo-in for the Meccanik-dancing (de)constructions of Zaumi (cf. ‘Zaum,’ an artificial language of Russian Futurist conception). Nürnberg’s low-rent answer to Raster Noton lets Dagshenma crash in its pad, with seven slabs of giddy glitch-hop a-bristle with badly broken beats and pressured speech, the latter a realization of Eitaro’s conceptual ambition.
Concept? Dagshenma’s click-tracks are cut with sample-slivers of voices and songs of the Ainu, North Nippon aboriginals who, we learn, have suffered discrimination over the years, encouraged to couple with ethnic Japanese to assimilate into future society, agents of their own extinction. Eitaro’s subtle social commentary brings their voices into modern electronic music in splintered form, mangling shards of their song and speech into what might be seen as a stuttering symbolic musical modelling of a quasi-effaced preservation via assimilation. Like much of Electroton’s output, Dagshenma seems, possibly unconsciously, driven by electronic music’s early concrète construction as much as by late-period Oval-esque deconstruction, though Zaumi inhabits a particular scratchy world of Funk-ed störung. It comes on here like gristly 8-bit electro, there like malfeasant robo-jazz, elsewhere a glitchy’n’scratchy funk replicant colluding with an instrumental hiphop mutant in a bizarre love triangle. It gets its jittery-skittery kicks on nothing so regular as 4-on-the-floor, its trick a stop-start stick-figure flickbook of hiccup and judder over which a riot of unwonted chord and discord skips in spindly kinesis.
Zaumi is, then at the very least, an idiosyncratic hybrid, but an uncomfy, often bumpy, ride – one decidedly not for those of nervous disposition. It’s not that the material is grim or dehumanised, as the almost winsome nearly shower-whistleable tune-lines gleefully squiggled out on “112,” “Et111,” and the title piece testify. In fact somehow its uber-post-digital tracks retains a kind of odd ludic dancey-ness – as of a group of benignly possessed dolls in a toyshop of wrongness. Those that feel they might fancy a fractured stopover far east of, say, Schematic, or maybe Chocolate Industries, be warned, as, like some hyper J-pop wind-up pup, the unrelenting rough and tumble of Zaumi ’s errorist activity may prove ultimately too wearing for all but the most intrepid avant-idm enthusiast.
Zaumi is out now on Electroton. [Listen]
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