Tanaka Hideyuki: Think Zero
Microcosm

saidsound: Singing Laundry
Microcosm

When not overseeing Anticipate and working on his Scattered Practices follow-up, Microcosm head Ezekiel Honig dons his saidsound alias to indulge a jones for eccentric and experimental dance music-making. The two cuts comprising Singing Laundry offer a succinct portrait of the saidsound style: in “Singing Singers Singing,” rattles and croaking voice fragments careen over a pulsating throb of subterranean bass lines and warbling chords; by comparison, “Reworking The Laundry” (a rework, naturally, of Macrofun Volume 4's “My Laundry is Drying”) is a little less cubistic in spirit, elastically stretches out a base of lapping pulses and shimmering chords for the voice snippets and percussion accents that flutter overtop.

Tanaka Hideyuki's disjointed dance music fits the microcosm aesthetic like a glove (and, by extension, those associated with foundsound and goosehound too). On Think Zero's three tracks, Hideyuki's nominally funky tech-house material feels like it's constantly on the brink of being hijacked by the flotilla of machine noise with which it's relentlessly besieged. A viral quality permeates the opener “In the Middle” with background whirrs and a woozy, slip-sliding trail of willowy chords threatening to derail the song's more solidly-grounded foundation of hefty bass prod, hand-claps, and sprinting house groove. Similarly, all manner of burbling bleeps and machine scrapes slather the rollicking pulse of “Digestion Is Fine” while in “Think Zero” a punchy house skip charges forth despite the dense blanket of noise accompanying it. The idiosyncratic character of Think Zero suggests that Hideyuki purposefully designs his futurist material to exist equidistant from the dance floor and listening post.

July 2008