Where other artists who have embraced the windy strains and shifting timbres of the pipe organ tend to go in for liturgical refrains, celebrations of the mundane or juxtapositions of the two – like Charlemagne Palestine whose swirling harmonies and rippling overtones for carillon and pipe organ from Strumming Music and Schlingen-BlƤngen through Godbear and his recent outing on Blank Forms have increasingly paid ode to his stuffed toy divinities – the long opening track of the latest album MMM by the Japanese composer FUJ||||||||||TA sounds like a Munchian scream observed in slow motion through the fogged porthole of a submersible.
Returning to Hallow Ground for the first time since his breakthrough effort iki, which was released back in the harrowing spring of 2020 during the first throes of the coronavirus pandemic, on ‘M-1’ the wheezing steam train of the artist’s patented pipe organ slips surreptitiously off the tracks and takes a deep dive through choppy waters. Vincent van Gogh might have imagined the nauseous, blocky and muted flats of reds and greens which characterise his La Berceuse portraits of Augustine Roulin as lullabies or tangible sources of comfort for lonely Icelandic fishermen, but on ‘M-1’ the idiosyncratic organ specialist pulls us out of the cosseting cabin and into the dankest hull of the ship, pressed up against its swaying sides as noxious fumes from the smokestacks accentuate the sky and muffled foghorns trail off into the azure aether.
Back on shore, ‘M-2’ finds FUJ||||||||||TA engaging in a gasping and palpitating ritual chant, a kind of stratified or sublimated panic attack which evokes the manner and patterns of Inuit throat singing. Since 2009, the artist has been recording almost exclusively with his hand-built pipe organ, hitherto comprised of eleven pipes and a fuigo box bellows of a kind which was traditionally used in Japanese swordsmithing, but on MMM his organ’s hand-operated air pump was swapped out for an electric version which freed up the composer’s fingers and wrists. So the chugging rhythms of ‘M-1’ were wrought by a gun microphone waved close to the pipes of his organ, while ‘M-2’ features the inhale and exhale of his ‘third voice’ singing technique, cultivated over the past decade alongside the whinnying cries of his organ without keys.
‘M-3’ serves as a synthesis of the two pieces, combining their rhythms and melodies with more subdued shifts. In its opening moments the track is redolent of gagaku, traditional Japanese courtly music which blends regional dances, shamanistic Shinto ceremonies and a folk poetics, here cut across by a sort of sawing motion which abjures the loftier inclinations of FUJ||||||||||TA’s instrument. Looser chants and breathy whispers are buttressed by guttural grows and throaty exercises of a percussive nature, a topline of curled smoke which rises above a garden of gravel and grit.
