From the wobbly revolutions of the title track which opens What Is Not Strange?, the composer and synthesist Tashi Wada remains firmly committed to the bit, a smudged exploration of the undersides of things which elides the abstract and personal, the natural by way of foliage or more particularly satoyama, a Japanese term for the liminal zone between arable flat land and the billowing mountain foothills of the type which characterised the Hayao Miyazaki film My Neighbor Totoro, and the metallic in the sense of an examination of the space between fender and rim.
Over the stalled squibs of ‘What Is Not Strange?’ which sound like a spaceship skirting the ground as it tries to commence a helical takeoff, Julia Holter’s distinctive voice arcs and coos, a siren call as the vehicle spins on its own axis. On a pogo stick with helium springs, ‘Grand Trine’ marries baroque trills with a positively charged atmosphere, its jaunty keys, sublinear drones, Dev Hoff’s murky bass and the strains of Ezra Buchla’s viola finally coming together as the rolling cymbals of Corey Fogel help to carry the song to a climax, alongside a stretched wail from Holter which lies somewhere between keening and rapture. And a ‘Revealed Night’ sounds like an elevated daybreak, the first rays seen though groggy eyes and that waking sensation as though experienced from atop the High Line or a high wire, with tenuous smears of viola above a precipitous mix of bird calls, far-off sirens and other azure static.
This music is too gaseous to fit neatly within the confines of contemporary classical and far too involved to be merely ambient. It contains the nascent winds and polyphonies of Renaissance music and some of the accents of Romanticism, the glossolalia of the Cocteau Twins and the aeriform sheen of vaporwave, a little bit redolent too of the mid-seventies ECM catalogue and contemporary descendants like the recent Shabaka Hutchings album Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace which saw the saxophonist swap his tenor for flutes including the shakuhachi and svirel and the groovy road spectres of Ghosted II by the trio of Johan Berthling, Andreas Werliin and Oren Ambarchi.
Written and recorded over a five-year period which encompassed the death of his father – the acclaimed Fluxus artist, downtown scenester, reedy drone purveyor and instrument builder Yoshi Wada – and the birth of his daughter, Tashi Wada on What Is Not Strange? shifts from the slender strings and xenharmonic tuning systems of his earlier efforts Alignment, Duets and Nue to dabble with surreal song structures at the head of a fulsome ensemble. That includes his partner Julia Holter and her longtime collaborator Devin Hoff – whose most recent work includes a spin as part of the New York quintet Sunny Five, a poignant tribute to his dear friend Ariel Tonkel and an incendiary outing as one half of Mendoza Hoff Revels – plus the Chelsea Wolfe violist Ezra Buchla and another Holter regular in the form of Corey Fogel on percussion.
Wada and Hoff were mainstays of Holter’s recent album Something in the Room She Moves, where Hoff’s fretless bass played a bristling counterpoint while Wada supplemented the heady swirl on his trusty Prophet-6 plus the Oberheim OB-X8 and bagpipes. Those pipes became synonymous with the work of his father from his performances at Manhattan venues like The Kitchen in the seventies to his influential albums and installations of the eighties and nineties, and while Tashi lays down his reeds on What Is Not Strange? he manages to conjure the same acoustics, a series of drones and overtones which might faintly resemble recent bagpipe or bagpipe-adjacent efforts by Sholto Dobie, Carme LĆ³pez, Mat Muntz and SĆ©bastien Forrester.
The song ‘Sun Girl’ from Something in the Room She Moves was inspired by Holter’s daughter with Wada, while a snippet from her ultrasound session, filtered through a phaser to sound like a hi-hat, was embedded within the underwater atmospherics of ‘Evening Mood’. Wada also pays tribute to their child on What Is Not Strange?, as the track ‘Grand Trine’ refers to an assemblage of three or more planets in an equilateral triangle on the zodiac wheel, an astrological configuration which was present in their daughter’s birth chart.
Wada describes What Is Not Strange? as a ‘deep embrace of life and its cycles’ which at the same time carries with it his father’s sense of humour. The death of Yoshi Wada back in the spring of 2021 prompted Tashi to reconnect with his extended family in Japan, a real journey of discovery where he found in the uncle he barely knew an almost uncanny resemblance to the looks and mannerisms of his dad, and was also presented with objects which told the story of his family’s history in post-war Kyoto. One of those objects was some decorative wrapping paper from a confectionary store which his grandmother ran after the war, when her husband and Tashi’s grandfather had died and the family was struggling to make ends meet. A traditional tenugui towel printed with the same design is included with the artist’s edition of the double vinyl.
‘Asleep to the World’ sets organ keys against the fricatives and sibilants and barely audible murmurings of Holter’s voice, a track comprised of short staggered sections which pulls apart liturgical airs with a whinnying draught, while Hoff’s bass and Fogel’s tumbling percussion create a dual movement between plunging descent and fetterless uplift.
Meanwhile on ‘Flame of Perfect Form’ gusty reeds accompanied by sustained tones and Holter’s vocals congeal to sound a little bit like Phoebe singing over Ross’s rudimentary bagpipe playing on a famous Friends credit sequence. If you ever saw that and found it in any way appealing, this is a record that will work for you, but the gesture is rarefied as the song develops over crashing cymbals and watery drones, with Holter’s voice dipping in and out of the mix and eventually deepening as the light becomes more tenebrous, hefty riffs pervading the atmosphere until everything finally sputters out.
As the title suggests, ‘Under the Earth’ bores down under a canopy of stars, a song of field work or farm labour accompanied only by far-flung cosmic static and the blackened tar of night, which conjures a Patti Smith comparison: if the title and some of the other early pieces vaguely suggest the Radio Ethiopia track ‘Ain’t It Strange’ with its scum and spunk, then ‘Under the Earth’ bears the faintest echoes of the funereal Horses classic ‘Birdland’.
On the other hand ‘Subaru’ asks what if the one-night stand suggested by the sleek body and nimble chassis of a little red Corvette was not swapped out but sublimated by a model of Japanese reliability? Summoning the Pleiades star cluster and gliding with a little more drag, the song features a throttled drone and the tethered straying of Ezra Buchlaās viola, with a mezzanine of fairground synthesizer before Julia Holterās warped and layered vocals wonder aloud whether it might be best to turn around and go home before everybody winds up a little bit carsick.
The title What Is Not Strange? comes from a poem of the same name by the surrealist Philip Lamantia, hailed by AndrĆ© Breton as ‘a voice that rises once in a hundred years’ while still in his youth, and portrayed by Tashi Wada as a poet who ‘chased down dreams in words’. An influence on the Beats who was fond of jazz and in the fifties explored the use of peyote with the Washoe people of Nevada, his first collection Erotic Poems was published at the age of just nineteen years old and he was prolific from the lates fifties through the sixties before later in life returning to Catholicism.
Lamantia’s coopted poem asks ‘What is not strange? / now that I’ve swallowed the Pacific Ocean / and sabotaged the Roman Empire / and you have returned / from all your past lives / to sip the snakes of my fingertips’. Elsewhere the imagist ‘Witness’ evokes a dark suit ‘worn warm’ and ‘rose flesh caught on the orange woman’s buttons’, while the opening line of ‘Meadowlark West’ reads ‘Choppers in the night husk the brilliants of thought’, prescient as the What Is Not Strange? track ‘Time of Birds’ opens with the whirring of rotor blades and ominous oohs, a pure drone as if summoned by Holter’s voice until organ swells assert themselves around the halfway point, with a discursive to and fro which takes on a slightly elegiac or languid pastoral character.
The melody from ‘Calling’ is based on a traditional Swedish herding call or ‘kulning’ as sung by the folk musician Elin Lisslass, from her 1966 album LocklĆ„tar och Musik pĆ„ Horn och Pipa, a more soothing drone with organ drags over which Holter’s voice twines and arcs until a few transportive closing synth stabs. ‘Plume’ is more plummy and fragrant, with more of those far-off drum rolls and the resonant fiddle-like folk-inflected stylings of Ezra Buchla’s viola, an amble which is on the precipice of a stumble but remains finely poised, skirted by Wada’s synths and Holter’s especially delicate vocals before those synthesizers take over through a spiralling motif, an extra-terrestrial in a flying bicycle cart or the prophet Elijah in his chariot, with the passengers admiring the view on this most dizzying of astral ascents.
And the closer ‘This World’s Beauty’ is a reprise of ‘Grand Trine’ yet more windswept and climactic, with Holter speaking out her heart and mind as What Is Not Strange? comes to terms on a moment of winsome and worldswept catharsis.
