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Desert Island Discs

I’ve never actually had a proper listen to the BBC Radio programme, but I thought I’d list a few of my all-time favourite albums. I might add to this page later.

NEXUS-2060 (Capsule, 2005)

So, I’ve recently arrived in Japan for my year abroad at uni, I’m living on my own for the first time in my life, and I have a bit of cash in my wallet. More money than sense, perhaps, but this one time, I happened to make a sensible choice at the shop. I had known of Yasutaka Nakata from Perfume and I wanted to know what the deal was with this “Capsule” thing he was also doing. I got this and maybe a few other albums (I discovered Denki Groove right at this time, too—fun group), and I head back to the dorm and stick this disc into the CD player in the shared kitchen, and then after the faux spaceship pre-flight announcement as the intro track, I’m hit with this.

Well, it’s at this point that I’ll admit I can’t really do music writing very well at all (Why did I decide to write this post in the first place, you say? Good question!), but I’d like to give it a try. Now, “space station No. 9” starts off with a piano riff that it will come back to often for the rest of the track, plus the vocals of Toshiko Koshijima. It already has a lot of energy in the first seconds, but then it goes even louder with these huge brass chords at the 20-second mark. This is the point at which I understand that I’m in for a really good time—I can’t remember exactly what I did all those years ago, but I think I was just standing there stunned for a while, before considering taking the CD to my dorm room to listen to it with headphones.

After listening to it so many times, and especially now as I listen to it while trying to dissect it and pin it down with words, I can see how the structure of it is so very simple: the piano riff, the Toshiko Koshijima riff, the other vocal riff (with a clave rhythm, and I have a soft spot for that), the brass, the drums, and other short phrases mixed and matched together in alternating high-energy/low-energy segments. But still, I will always remember the impact this track gave me in the first half minute, and how it ends with all the elements playing together, plus the synth lead switching up the melody to give an extra surprise. The nostalgia of it brings me back to this track now and then—it’s nice to listen to and reminisce.

Berlin Sea (Gala, 2018)

This is my absolute go-to for “underwater music,” if that makes any sense. Again, the first track never fails to blow me away: the steady percussive sounds are joined by a staccato just-about-melodic loop to keep time moving forward, in contrast with the slow, graceful, sawtooth tones. And yet, even as I re-listen to it now, I’m not quite sure what is going on with the meter in a lot of these parts! I try to count but I always get confused, and instead of admitting to simply being bad at music theory (well, that too, but), I’m gonna say that the sense of disorientation in these polyrhythms echoes the feeling of being without a map in an expansive depth of water, of being witness as a stranger in another world of fish and undersea flora and darkness.

By mojilove on 2024-09-23

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