Yoshinori Hayashi - γ

  • Three belters, one dud.
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  • Whenever a jobbing DJ tries their luck with a Yoshinori Hayashi record, the effort might resemble a pottery class gone wrong. Unless you keep a close ear on how a track like "0208" develops—knowing, say, when to mix out from its choral smears and noxious ambient plumes—the whole thing can run away from you, spinning your carefully crafted set into a splattering mess. Talking about "Agent Dissolve Device," whose detuned keys and shamanic vocals haunted its disco-house shell, Hayashi made it clear that his music filters out DJs who want it easy. "Why did I choose a light kick?" he said. "Why did it become a 'hard to use track'? There are many answers, but I think it would be great if some DJs who sensed the answer like it and play it." The mostly excellent γ is a little less likely to trip DJs up. Classic drum machine sounds, sly nods to canonical styles ("U"'s tarry low-end recalls early '90s bleep and bass) and on-the-grid structures make Hayashi's latest EP his most accessible. But rest assured: γ remains satisfyingly weird. "Cs" could be a housey mid-'90s techno cut until wrong-sounding synth keys—like they've been played by the family cat—clang over shearing harpsichords. The other tracks are even more of a lark, but of the two only "I" is worth your time. Its gothic vox pads evoke a PG-rated lair, about as spooky as a bouncy castle—not long after four minutes, some almost-sunny major chords suggest it's been timeshared by Sonic The Hedgehog. "Sr," stranger still and far less appealing, is half DJ tool, half Dadaist prank. Like XLR8R's fake Villalobos podcast or the dumbest Sex Tags record ever made, "Sr"'s bass drum chunters on until you get the joke. I'm just not sure it was worth telling again.
  • Tracklist
      A1 U A2 Cs B1 I B2 Sr
RA