What you get with Nebulous Sequences is an upgrade of Hakobune’s accumulated drone knowledge to full Masters level; mastering of another kind, by new ambient every-where-man Ian Hawgood, ensures you feel the benefit of these sustaining sopor-scapes and restorative reveries, ending both relaxed and uplifted.
The Drone has been variously analysed over the years, a recent treatment reading: ‘From the modern viewpoint, drones are effective because of their relationship to the void that existentialists believe surrounds human activity. In 1927 Georges Bataille spoke of the universe as “formless,” and all of “official” human culture as an attempt to resist this fundamental fact, which reduced the cosmos to nothing more than “a spider or a gob of spit.” There is something of this quality of formlessness at work in “dark” drones, with their dissonant tones, the endless decay, distortion and degradation of pure tones, in the name of entropic noise. This formlessness, which blurs and loosens the boundaries of individual identity, could be the source of the ecstatic, “high” quality that often comes with drone music.’ (Boon, 2002). Or, less cerebrally: ‘Good drone is more powerful than any huge orchestra piece, more emotional than any ballad, and more f*cking terrifying than any gothic nonsense. It does something to you, affects you with pure, formless, emotion. No, not even emotion. More basic than emotion.’ (Zeff, 2003)
Against the backdrop of such intense resonances, it’s interesting to view the recently emergent sub-genre of Ambient Drone, whose throne we find Hakobune occupying with less blood and thunder, albeit with ample shadows and fog. Nebulous Sequences is the latest addition to a body of work that’s slowly swollen from slender to voluminous. With the mounting cargo of his musical species, Takahiro Yorifuji’s nom de disque (Hakobune (Jap.) = Ark (Eng.)) seems apt, as Japan’s prince of tides’ recent release run makes up a corpus of 40 or more from which to draw, meaning Long-form Lovers could contemplate, if not The Eternal of LaMonte Young, at least A Whole Day of Hakobune. But, though the infinite guitar tsar hits the sweet spot with this ambient double-whammy—of cathedralesque and chthonic, of the air and of the earth, super- and sub-, is it ultimately any more than a beauteous blur… a lovely longueur? Layer on layer of harmonic drapes artfully suspended to soundtrack… what? A droopy drowse? The cover’s grey spreads over the entire expanse, apt signifier for a seeming monolithic surface—revealed as teeming on zoom-in, with minute variations of tint and tonality. The thick fog-shroud and surface chronostasis belie a constant flow below: scintillas in the mist, billows of tone color seen through a filmy glass darkly. All is veiled—in tune with the autumnal, morning dew-dripping. Sound mirrors vision. Mist chokes the color of melody in a murk of guitar tone-haze, treetops smudged in a saturated vastness of chromatic dispersion. The prevailing tenor of these star-gaze and cloud-watch works may be enervated, but it is not sapping. The deep lagging melody of “Pt. 3” might even be ‘the most beautiful ambient drone ever’ (Fluid Radio), rolling swathes freighted with… what? Nostalgia…? Longing…? The Immanent? You decide—it’s ok with Hakobune, a subscriber to the notion of music’s meaning-making multiplicity.
The terrain traversed bears echoes of other landscapes—from the Zen garden of compatriot Chihei Hatakeyama, through the tumbleweed wastes of early-mid Lid, to glimpses of the teeming beyond of Rhys Chatham‘s legions. There’s no new ground broken here, but after all that’s not what’s sought. What you get with Nebulous Sequences is an upgrade of Hakobune’s accumulated drone knowledge to full Masters level; mastering of another kind, by new ambient every-where-man Ian Hawgood, ensures you feel the benefit of these sustaining sopor-scapes and restorative reveries, ending both relaxed and uplifted.
Nebulous Sequences is available on VoxxoV.
