- It's hard to place Shape Of My Voice from the little-known Tokyo producer Jun Kimata. It's part-meditative drone techno, part-unfashionable wiggy trance, but the tension between these two sounds, plus a generous dose of the surreal, makes for beguiling music. This is best illustrated on the opening track "Two Billion Light-Years Of Silence." There's something weirdly plastic to its electroid beat and droning, throbbing chords—a synthetic universe in which a vocoded voice, hollow and reedy, sounds right at home. The voice recites a sequence of letters, round and round, while the arrangement swells and recedes.
"Train Music" twists the same materials into a slightly different shape. The beat is all crisp, clipped claps, while the vocal—this time in pitched-up Japanese—is goofier and Kimata's space-age sound design is softened by a housey chord stab. This detracts from the music's strange ambiguity, though the track remains engrossing, hitting swirling peak moments which disintegrate like fog on a warming morning. An equally bizarre ambient number separates the two tracks. "Untitled 2" finds a coherent thread trough vocoded Barbershop chords, deflating-balloon squeals and rich, turbulent drone. Andres Aguirre's "Spicy Paracousia Mix" of "Train Music" completes the release, but lacks the blend of colours that makes Kimata's originals so distinctive.
TracklistA1 Two Billion Light-Years Of Silence
A2 Untitled 2
B1 Train Music
B2 Train Music (Andres Aguirre Spicy Paracousia Mix)