(2021) Reiko and Tori Kudo - Tangerine
Review:
For husband-and-wife duo , music is all around us. Tori searches mountain ranges for melodies, holding staff paper up to the horizon and sketching out songs. Reiko favors bird song, and has shared some of her favorites with readers of The Wire in an Invisible Jukebox session. Not only do the Kudos hear and see music everywhere, but they also believe that music is in all of us. This ethos is personified in Maher Shalal Hash Baz, the ever-evolving troupe at which Reiko and Tori are the kernel (along with euphonium player Hiroo Nakazaki). New musicians, non-musicians, friends, and passers-by: the couple encourage everyone to participate in the music-making. It’s almost as if they’ve re-written and expanded upon the hermetic principle of vibration so that it reads, “nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates; everything (and everyone) produces melodies.” Tangerine originally arrived in 2013 on the Hyotan imprint, ostensibly the Kudo family house label, adorned with austere but lovely artwork courtesy of the couple’s son Namio. Melbourne’s A Colorful Storm have given it the full-on vinyl treatment, complete with lyrics in both Japanese and English. The music, presented as it was originally engineered, reflects the over 30 years of collaboration and intimacy between the couple. Reiko’s high register vocal melodies seem to intertwine completely with the landscapes that Tori paints with sound. At times, the couple dance lovingly together, swaying from note to note. Tori’s piano leads Reiko (or is it the other way around) through “The Deep Valley of Shadow.” At others, they hold hands and leap into the unknown, improvising together symbiotically. Witness the spindly, low-register guitar of “Kanakana” blindly barreling through a haze of sawing violins, with Reiko in tow. The intimacy of these songs is truly captured not in the individual notes being played but in the almost quotidian sounds that surround those notes. All but one of the pieces was laid to tape in a studio, but Tori – who welcomes and engages with sonic discoloration – allows many non-musical sounds to seep into the recordings. The slight shuffling at the beginning of “The Deep Valley of Shadow” prefaces the piano ballad to come. You can almost detect Tori inhaling as he prepares to sound the first note of the title track, and you can hear him counting off “The Swallow II.” It’s this warm embrace of sound that elevates Tangerine from a mere collection of folk songs into a truly transcendent experience. — dusted
Track Listing:
1.Deep Sea Fish 03:00
2.The Deep Valley of Shadow 02:47
3.We May Be 03:13
4.Kanakana 03:08
5.Homeless 03:08
6.Tangerine 03:57
7.The Swallow II 04:04
8.When Seeing the Setting Sun Alone 05:04
Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk, experimental, lo-fi
Country: Japan
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
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