NRTYA

NRTYA is an easy record to celebrate but a difficult one to enjoy. The album fully realises its mission of drawing upon ancient traditions to make futuristic music. Yoshida Daikiti’s sitar inspires a suite of punk-raga workouts which are enlivened by Motoyuki Hamamoto’s gamelan-influenced percussion and rooted by Akita Goldman’s bass. The X factor comes from Yoshimi, an artist and multi-instrumentalist with an uncompromisingly cool CV that includes her role as longtime drummer for Japanese rock band Boredoms and a collaboration with Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon.

Yoshimi’s vocal contributions are in-your-face, breathlessly following Daikiti’s rapid-fire sitar riffs and morphing into computer-voice stabs that form part of the percussive palette. ‘Social This Dance’ establishes a demented jig through a duet between Daikiti’s sitar and a mysterious effect that might have been inspired by a dial-up modem. The sinister shanty devolves into a vocal-percussion tandem that sounds like the drummer is having a violent altercation with a duck. The raucousness becomes relentless over a whole album however.

We can all rejoice in knowing that our world makes space for odd creative people to engage in strange sonic experiments, such as SAICOBAB’s NRTYA, even if we cannot fully embrace the results.