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Lullatone - Little Songs About Raindrops (Plop)
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How do you feel
about music boxes? And when exactly did toy instruments become the indie must-have?
Me, I blame Björk.
Lullatone is a solo project by Shawn James Seymour, originally from the US,
now based in Nagoya, Japan. Little Songs About Raindrops is nine little songs
about raindrops.
In the wrong hands, it has to be said, toy instruments are awfully wincy -
awww, look at the kiddies make the muse sick. In the right hands, though (Múm,
Sigur Rós), they're just another instrument, except they invest the
music with that beguiling pseudo-innocence (why childhood ever became synonymous
with 'innocence' beats me) that can transport you into some very strange states.
Most of Seymour's collaborators are Japanese, so any potential mawkishness
is mitigated by the firsthand exotic, and any strangeness somehow blunted
by familiarity (all the tracks sound vaguely familiar, in a forgotten-lullaby
kind of way). It's hard for Western ears to adjust to - and properly hear
- indigenous Japanese music (or any number of other non-Western musics, come
to that) because it incorporates structures and scales and tunings that sound
just too dissonant and alien to get a handle on. Seymour's sensibilities are
clearly open to the influence of his collaborators' culture, though. He has
a feeling for the minimal that suggests bonsai and the haiku rather than the
postmodern. And at times, he makes his primitive percussive instruments (melded
with the barest of laptop glitches and beats) resemble the organic - wind-chimes,
the Aeolian harp - as much as the miniature gamelan. Personally, I look forward
to the day when such a Japanese/American collaboration as this leans more
to the western than the eastern Pacific. In the meantime, it gets closest
here whenever the beguiling voice of Yoshimi Tomida - a kind of Japanese Valtysdóttir
twin - emerges, flirting with those impossible Engrish words like a precocious
schoolgirl.
Doubtless, there'll be one or two hairy-fingered death-metal freaks with filed-down
teeth out there whose cup of tea this album is just not going to be. 'Twee'
and 'unbearably' are two words such a person might use. A lot depends on whether
you're more into Tinky Winky or Po (me, I'm more of a Bing and Bong kinda
guy). If the splish-splosh song (track 8) doesn't immediately get adopted
by Rag Doll Productions, there's no justice in the world. However, if you
can still go ooooh at fireworks, or manage to raise a smile at a vanishing
coin trick - if, in other words, there's an ounce of potential for childish
wonder left in that wounded old soul o' yourn, I don't see how this fabulous
little CD can possibly fail to delight. I've had it playing for almost two
months now, and I never tire of it.
August 2004
