“Even if extremely quiet and pensive, Angel remains not less a heart-rending album”
1 Bright Waters 17:02 2 Fairy's Blues 15:34 3 Angel 16:14 4 Fair Wind 16:02 LUNISOLAR: LR009
(CD/DDL 65:17) (V.F.)
(Ambient & drones)
Victim of the tsunami that struck the North of Japan in 2011, Juta Takahashi had to reconstruct his home and studio from A to Z. Peaceful and meditative man, this outburst of nature profoundly seems to have shattered, who wouldn’t be, the Japanese composer who offers in ANGEL; an album that has two phases. If the first part recaptures the soft seraphic movements of his previous albums, the second one plunges us into apocalyptic ambiences which betray the internal anger and the powerlessness of Juta Takahashi. An album of decline and revival moulded on resiliency, ANGEL is the tearing shout of a touching heart in nees of an inner peace. Fine sound particles are irradiating the opening of Bright Waters which wakes up with all the luminosity of synth rays laminated by shimmering waves. The ambience is dark and tinted of a deep melancholy that delicate piano notes, falling with all the hesitation of the dark desires, perfume of a wonderful astral aura. The synth layers are deliciously morphic and spread their mist like big dark clouds which hide the iridescences of a rainbow dying of patience to be watered by a single note of this meditative piano. A note of which the impact splashes the silence of shadows which are slowly turning into a strange foggy choir with delicate dark breaths. Bright Waters is a wonderful music piece which has its place for nights of insomnia. It’s in my Ipod, into the nights of calmness folder with lot of other music by Juta. Fairy’s Blues is more luminous and begins with waves of synth which mix its breaths of sharp metal, its blue mists and its silvered voices into a powerful meditative symbiosis. The movement is slow and less musical than Bright Waters with more acuteness drones which are transformed into a spectral choir from which the metallic breaths are covering gongs and chords lost in forgetting. The synth breezes which get accumulate as waves swirling on themselves are opening the weird title-track which bubbles in a powerful endless maelstrom. There is something intensely seraphic in Angel which tears the hearing like torrents of mud tore lives. It’s a rangy torrent of iridescent prisms where the fury is intense and repressed in strata with tears of powerlessness which flow like magmatic cries of rage. This long and intense amorphous movement becomes intensified in a long atonal crescendo where the anger of Juta Takahashi flows with all the fury of the hopelessness of a man forced to the acceptance. It’s intense, deeply moving and rather heart-rending, and this for the hearing and emotions. Like a sunset with golden beams sweeping a destroyed land full of dust Fair Wind widens its rays, freeing a prismatic heat with layers which interlace in a lascivious dance of times. Celestial and apocalyptic, these layers draw elongated soporific movements in tones as much coldly as lyrical, balancing an enchanting paradox which fans itself around redemptive bells. This 9th opus of Juta Takahashi exudes the emotional duality that tears an author who always approached life with all the magnificence offered in a meditative feast. Even if extremely quiet and pensive, ANGEL remains not less a heart-rending album where the Japanese composer roars his sufferings through layers of synth in tints of ochred sulfur. It’s intense and by moments very poignant but it always remains so profoundly lyrical, as music weaved in the horns of the god Aeolus. Sylvain Lupari (October 1st, 2012) ***½**
Available at Juta Takahashi Bandcamp