Yakushima Treasure, the most magical music I heard in a long time
I would like to bring to your attention the most amazing, wonderful and magical piece of music I have heard in a long time. Something completely different from the music I usually review here, namely the new album by Suiyoubi no Kampanera, or Wednesday Campanella. You can hear it in its entirety on YouTube and also on Spotify.
I have been a fan of this band from the beginning and often posted short reviews of their music, which could be decribed as very danceable but quirky pop, firmly rooted in R&B and disco, with a royal dose of hip-hop and rap and many references to folk and traditional Japanese and Chinese music.
Singing in a trance
Yakushima Treasure is quite something else. It’s a soundscape filled with song and melody and sounds of nature and people, fragments of conversation, of a busy street, a rustling forest or streaming water, some kind of machine blowing off steam, some wooden mechanical tool or something, recorded on the subtropical Japanese island Yakushima. Suiyoubi no Kampanera singer KOM_I sounds like she’s in a trance, slow and whiney and as if her singing was recorded on someone’s phone in a kitchen or a hall-way, with someone else strumming absently on a shamisen or a a ukelele or something.
Then, later on, she again sings like in a trance, but more sexual, rythmic, exaltic, accompanied by a great percussionist and flute-like tones. At the end she sounds like she’s singing a lullaby, sweet and tender.
It’s very strange but totally absorbing and hypnotic, it has a great power, at least over me. I just can’t stop listening to it. When it’s not on my music player, it plays in my head.
I am not entirely sure if this is a proper Suiyoubi no Kampanera album, because it seems to be just singer KOM_I and another musician, Oorutaichi, who’s not of Suiyoubi. They both went to Yakushima to let themselves be overwhelmed and inspired by the nature and the people on it.
Documentary
There’s a documentary about the making of Yakushima Treasure on YouTube, but only the first two installments are free, here and here. The rest requires a subscription to YouTube Premium, wich is almost 18 bucks a month, a little expensive. But in those first two installments we get a lot of information. KOM_I, for instance, talks about always doing things to please other people, and how Yakushima Treasure is the first thing she’s done that she really wanted to do herself.
So I don’t know if this is the end of Suiyoubi no Kampanera as we know it. I certainly hope KOM_I will keep doing stuff like this. Not to please me, of course, but to please herself. (PB)
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