Midori Hirano Lushrush. When economic ruin has had its way and desiccated souls all over the world it is important to have records that lead to escape and visions of beauty. The first track is like clockwork precision beauty, the spun silver of a web, the rhythmic tone of a crisis softening rain lashing on the west side of a home, the sun's rays illuminating the air in front of your eyes. It's delicate and articulate and wordless and stirring. She's Japanese. It is beginning to be a possibility that I will never write about male made music again. So many girls in a row. I am writing this in the past. it is actually later than the date that will show up n this post. Visits to the past allow me to reconcile my thoughts, allow me to peel slowly the visions of the days past and evaluate the values I held on that particular day. The violin is slyly placed. it is in my left ear, underneath the paiano, the drum machine, the basketball video game effects and and some high squealed synthesizer, but it carries the emotion of the track. Strings are so cliche ridden but does anything other than perhaps a naked piano affect the human psyche as much. I dont know anything about music theory, there might be an objective explanation having to do with minor chords and timbre and tone and whatever but I don't know anything about music. This track is delicate, the violin coming to the fore now, in fire, a resonant touch to bring the track to climax if you will. Another joins the fray, it's marvelous. It's over. Japan has had much more time to digest this economic malaise being as they have been in the midst of a malaise for some time. A brief respite was offered by Japanese Elvis but he went away and now the old men have returned and 'rock'n'roll' has got to go. Midori has left japan. She could not make ends meet in a deflationary environment most probably so she has decamped to Germany. She has not acquired any of the teutonic joi de vivre. This is organic, delicately folded, piano-based electronic music. More violins to disperse widely her ache and her voice now joining the experience. A whisper mightier than a voice. A gentle breeze until the climax with drums and bombast. The nice thing about girls, although there are many, is rarely do they want to rawk. I am sexist as well as racist. But what is the point of drums really? Do I really miss the drums when they are not present? No. I don't think I like drums at all. I like Long Fin Killie Drums and Pram Drums. And I like drum machines but drums are so luddite, so troglodytic, lets bash these skins instead of bashing skulls. Lets play drums and horns at Gaugamela and share cup of tea made from Darius' eyeballs. Bah. These drums are superfluous, I would have preferred a drum machine myself, a Grant Macnamara production for the I Love Music kids to mock as insufficient. Now the drums have disappeared. Perhaps her new German boyfriend plays drums and he beats the skins instead of beating the odds. Pianos and worldly wordless vocals and violins and over. Now to Calling, the shortest song on the album. I just finished writing about The Ideal Husband. That record was from 2008. This is from 2006. I am a time traveller. I write in the past about the past. Very existential. This track is a bit of fluff. I beat the piano instead of the muffin batter. I could play this. I could play anything really, I am a gifted musician. Not really. I have to take care not to offend strangers in my reviews, they may leave comments. But honestly is mentioning someone as being silly an insult? Silly hearts are lovely people. Much better that you were silly than cynical. Next track. Violins. This sounds like a school assignment. She's failing professor John Mcentire's class and he is telling her that she will never amount to anything because she can not grow a beard and by evidence can not write boring post rock songs and she is bravely rebelling by writing delicate compositions based around violins and the sounds of nature, a metaphorical knife fight in a bamboo forest on the Malay archipelago John the bamboo. These could be the songs of her wild and misspent youth in the yakuza. Poor child. She was taken in by Brian Keith and Robert Mitchum and rescued from a life of crime and drifting sub compact Toyotas. All of my knowledge of foreign cultures is acquired through American action movies. Her voice is never beyond a whisper, this feels more singer songwriter, a lone piano and sounds of the street below the window. It could be compiled with devastatingly poignant poetry but someone needs to shut the window in order for me to hear. Is it in english? Who knows. it is really very pretty. The Secret Aria. Now to Night Wish. I am making an editorial decision to write about music as little as possible and rather to use this as an exercise to see what the music conjures while listening. It is tiresome to continue to write that something is twinkly or marvelous or lovely. I will write about myself indulgently and simply use different adjectives with the same ubiquity these new modifiers will dazzle, such as miserable, portly, grey haired, etc... It will be thrilling. Trust me. Because, look this one is piano-y again, with some programming and some delightfully off kilter pacing and arrangements and I rather love it, I rather like this entire record but I suppose I can appreciate why real record reviewers focus so much on lyrics better to engage in fraudulent Freudian analysis of some kid with an IQ that has plunged 80 points since he started huffing paint than to try to describe the sound of a guitar in a manner that no one has ever managed before, managed better and done so more prolifically. I hate music reviews as a rule. it is why I celebrate my decision to write about myself and partake in fatalistic narcissism instead. Midori is undoubtedly more interesting than I am and could spend the greater part of a day writing auf Deutsch about how intuitive and brilliant her records are but I must then take her word for it, for me they are merely lovely as the spring. This is a bit like a 4AD record, in the 4AD of my dreams, where His Name is Alive didn't go in that Timbaland forest and where the Pixies did not disintegrate so that Frank Black could write comic books and where Clan of Xymoxx stayed unresurrected but Dif Juz reunited instead. In the new world filled with dryness and heat we will have loads of bands like Calexico and Tarnation. Dusty, dry, dust bowl troubadours, playing very quietly because the windmills only blow part of the time so they need to conserve electricity and to play loud is to make one culpable in the plot against humanity. Midori will be an anachronism. The good thing about a drier climate is that potato chips will take a frightfully long time to go stale. I don't have any idea what she is whispering about so even if I had wanted to dissect her prosody I would be at a loss. I could simply fabricate a lyric sheet. A Japanese in Germany? I would think she would be a bit like me who wouldn't, and marvel at the fury in the architecture. There is not any softness to be found in all of Germany except in the bellies of beer hall wenches. Everything else, I found, I've ben in one city, was sharp, rough, efficient. But that's my yankee jingoistic eye working. I haven't any German blood in me but I do have the French Canadian strain. I did refrain from calling anyone Boche while I was there. I am not sure why calling someone the stubborn head of a cabbage is so offensive though. Next song, now just field recordings, violins, voices recorded off of the television and static. It's really nice, really. See I veered back into the music and boom that's the sound of your head hitting the table, knocked out by the impact of excruciating boredom. It is difficult to continue to write about an album without picking one's fingers off of the keyboard for the duration, especially on electronic albums as they tend to be overlong and filled with a minimal number of ideas and so you are left in some rut of the mind desperately searching out how to inject a clever line about how Germans used the term 'florenzers' as an epithet but you can't quite manage it because you are not Gore Vidal and should these be a thesis on racial epithets even. You are not even Gertrude Stein. Next song. Piano has returned, darkly ambient and pretty, field recordings recorded inside an alpine tunnel on the autobahn in the middle of winter in Bavaria or wherever it is that the autobahn tracks to. I was never on the Autobahn, I am not a racist, only racists drive on the autobahn. Dim, beautiful, a haunting reference to the death of the sun in the hollow of dusk, the festival of rebirth in the early morning, the rush to appreciate the light before it is consumed by the night. Or something such as that. Something devilishly poetic and filled with glorious tributes to the gods of the noonday sky. It does sound very precise and academic. The Germans and the Japanese are suffering equally hard during this recession because of their passion for thrift. Unrepentant, profligate, flamboyant types such as the Italians will spend gaily through the recession. Germans will eat the recession and it will taste bitter, they will eat the concrete, they won't buy that big screen television that they cannot afford. It is all very admirable. I could be German, I've mentioned this before, I missed but one question on the German citizenship test. How did you do? I bet not as well as I did. Last song. Banging on a old can of shellac, made from Beetles, allegedly, my source is an internet music bulletin board. Now a piano, I could play this. It is a shellac can and one note on the piano. It is no small accomplishment that my years of training have prepared me to play something such as this. I do always make that claim but honestly I can't play anything and I doubt I could play this. i could play the Burning Hearts record as that was just someone pressing the pre-set button on the Casio. I could do that. In the library here there are librarians young and old and they all wear isotoner gloves while reshelving the books. I am made nervous by this. Has there been an outbreak o the plague among library patrons? We do have a great population of prairie dogs in the city but that strain does not normally infect we humans. Is it a conspiracy? Has it been relayed to librarians on a secret message board meant for librarians only? Or perhaps the blind librarians who reshelve their books by memorising the floor plan and shelf schematics of the entire library have decoded the secret message from the braille footpads that are being added to every intersection here and they then passed it on to their sighted colleagues. Mysteries. This song is boring, there then is my considered analysis. This record is beautiful.