- In the crowded electronic music scene, it's rare to find a corner so sparsely populated as the one Yoshinori Hayashi calls home. In fact, it's tempting to say that he's alone there. His debut, last year's The End Of The Edge EP for Going Good, was a swirl of competing currents: electronic loops against wild squalls of acoustic instruments, hypnotic house-wise grooves versus de-centred psychedelia. This year, these currents appear to be separating. The summer's The Forgetting Curve EP on JINN went far, far out (only to be pulled back to earth by a Sotofett remix). The Asylum EP, for Ital's Lovers Rock label, is more stable. Or so it initially appears.
A bouncy house beat declares "Agent Dissolving Device" as dance music. But other moods are sprinkled on top: wonky swirls of piano and hand-drums, wafts of birdcall, mumbling voices, some kind of twangy string instrument. After the three-minute mark, the groove ratchets up and firmer chords try to bring order to the proceedings. But after a while they give up, and with a few bars of queasy backmasked drums, we're back to the dazed cacophony of the opening.
The B-side gets weirder again. "Burrow" and "The Old Man" are strange, sepia-tinted piano pieces. The former sounds like a solemn serialist sketch played in an empty concert hall, while the latter is prettier, overlaid with strange skittish drum rolls. Hayashi's best tracks stack their ideas more densely, but these sparser ones still sound like little else out there.
TracklistA1 Agent Dissolving Device
B1 Burrow
B2 The Old Man