Yoshinori Hayashi - Uncountable Set

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  • It's rare to come across a genuinely baffling record, but a dip into Yoshinori Hayashi's catalogue will skew the statistics. The Tokyo producer doesn't trade in unfamiliar sounds, exactly—it's more that he scrambles the logic of the familiar, twisting orderly forms into head-spinning nightmares. The average Hayashi track might be anarchic sample-collage, ramshackle synthesis or a multi-tracked ensemble of live musicians—it's hard to tell. Maybe you're actually hearing several pieces of music, squeezed into a cramped space and left to get on with it. Hayashi's ideas often sound like dodgy reconstructions of a half-forgotten dance music canon. The feeling is particularly pronounced on his latest EP, for Disco Halal, which follows dazzling meltdowns on Going Good and Lovers Rock, and mimics the feeling of plunging through a kitschy Discogs wormhole. "Palanquin Bearing Monkey" could be bubbly proto-house meets heat-warped jazz fusion, the two layers rutting over a chuntering piano bassline ferried in from South America. Every now and then, a chipmunk voice—Hayashi himself?—sings a few mournful lines. On "Stepping On Dewdrops" taut post-punk disco meets the clammy organs of a B-movie horror soundtrack. The track's forest of percussion gets thicker until a cellist appears in the undergrowth, mad-eyed, mumbling and scratching out a house-of-horrors melody. "Pneuma" extends to an epic, disorientating nine minutes. It's both the funkiest track here—check the walk-the-dog jazz bassline—and the most forbidding, its disco beat weaving sharklike through a reverberant ocean of discordant orchestral sounds. From there we ditch out into the sparser "Chember," where keening wordless vocals are layered in ever-denser loops. It's the EP's only half-predictable moment, and thus its weakest.
  • Tracklist
      A1 Palanquin Bearing Monkey A2 Stepping On Dewdrops B1 Pneuma B2 Chember
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