Pitchfork

Aki Tsuyuko's own music has been made in the shadow of Nobukazu Takemura, her more famous and connected collaborator. Tsuyuko first lent her quintessentially innocent vocals to his Child's View project in 1998, and many of Takemura's subsequent records featured at least one Tsuyuko contribution. Takemura's favored technique during this glitched-out phase was to take her flat, indeterminate coos and feed them into the silicon chipper, combining the skipping utterances with repeating melodic phrases heavily indebted to Steve Reich.

It was a fruitful period for Takemura, yielding key tracks like "Meteor" and "Kepler", both of which would have been seriously diminished without Tsuyuko's contributions. Meanwhile, she quietly released her debut album Ongakushitsu in 1999. While Takemura's aesthetic depended heavily on software, Tsuyuko's could have come from any time since the development of the electric organ. She has acknowledged a debt to the piano music of Erik Satie, and while she shares his delicacy and understatement, her tunes are not especially melodic. Instead, they can be imagined as small musical sculptures, turning slowly in place without really going anywhere.

The visual aspect of Tsuyuko's music is made explicit on this limited-run boutique release, which combines a CD of new music with a hardcover book she wrote and illustrated. The book and music are designed to work together, with a few pages of drawings, text, and musical notation devoted to each track.

Musically, Hokane is of a piece with Tsuyuko's earlier release. Dynamic range is nonexistent; tracks develop according to a logic inspired by the loose patterns of nature, with melodies that could have been transcribed from a gently swaying wind chime. Though electronic organs remain central, Tsuyuko experiments with arrangement, scoring her music for flute, vibraphone, voice, and several other instruments. There is a strong similarity in timbre to Takemura's work circa Songbook, but Tsuyuko exhibits a patience and restraint that elevates the seemingly simple music to something more profound. She also transcends the easy poignancy of childhood references, opting instead for a removed formality, which provides ample distance for contemplation. The mood is tranquil, placid, and, at points, quite beautiful. Hokane is so unassuming it can very easily slip into the background, but I doubt Tsuyuko minds.

Of greatest interest in the book is the inclusion of the written score to the album, with clefs integrated into watercolors of geometric figures, blurred street scenes, and so on. If you read music, you can get a sense of how Tsuyuko uses repetition by observing the notes laid out on paper, and "seeing" this particular album reinforces the music's ability to evoke mood and color. Still, while the book is an attractive artifact and fits well with the music, it'll probably end up on the shelf for a while after you flip through it a couple of times. The important thing is that Tsuyuko has a solid new record that builds and improves upon her debut.