KUDO, REIKO - Kusa

"The use of amateurism and error as a compositional device characterizes the music of Tori Kudo, particularly in his group Maher Shalal Hash Baz. His wife, Reiko, is nowhere near as prolific (just two short albums in the last ten years) but her interests lead her more towards the pursuit of spontaneity and a considered naturalness. Both share a desire to jolt the experience of playing and listening to music out of stale routines and atrophied sensibilities, but through play and haiku-esque close attention to daily life, rather than with a gun to the head. The albums are suffused with a warm, almost alchemical domesticity, rooted in the familiar rhythms of home, community, and the seasons. Hito was recorded from summer through to early autumn 2005 and the drowsy heat of the season lies over it like a mosquito net. The hesitant vocals and piano that opens its first track are underpinned by what initially sounds like the faint wow and flutter of a cheap tape recorder. Suddenly, as though a window has been flung open, the distortion is revealed to be the pylon-buzz of cicadas in the garden outside. As the sound rises to fill the room, the senses are beguiled, place, time, and sensation evoked with the most minimal of means. Kusa sounds slightly stiffer as it takes us from autumn through winter, but on both albums the spare instrumentation is enjoyably creative, with kitchen-cupboard percussion, a vacuum cleaner, the sound of the rain and a gang of local kids on recorders melded effortlessly around the romantic flourishes of Tori's piano playing. Reiko's albums are always song-based, miniature wisps of melody that sound like something composed over the washing-up, the words perfectly balanced between observation and signification. Her voice has that childlike upper register of many Japanese female singers, but with a definite strength in the low notes. Most striking is her enunciation the slightest tremor of hesitation, a lack of demonstrativeness that makes Vashti Bunyan sound like Whitney Houston, the voice pitched uncannily into an area where the exhaled breath seems to shimmer naturally into song. This is captivating and at times heartbreakingly emotive work". - Alan Cummings, The Wire June 2006