SOUNDTRACK: KAWABATA MAKOTO [河端一]-I’m in Your Inner Most (2001).
Recently, Kawabata Makoto [河端一], mastermind behind Acid Mothers Temple, revealed a new bandcamp site for some newer releases.
This is Kawabata Makoto’s minimal music works by his own ensemble reissued in 2002 with a bonus track.
This album is in fact two parts of the same song (technically). And they’re the first of his solo works to predominantly feature organ. It also features artwork by Kawabata Sachiko
“I’m In Your Inner Most Part.1″ (19.11) starts with a repeated organ riff and (the inevitable) high-pitched feedback sounds. This one also has the voice of Audrey Ginestet repeating one word (drift? drip? something in French?). Every few measure a new item is added and repeated–mostly organ notes in a pattern or a scale. The last five minutes or so feels like a two note siren as the high notes soar around the top.”
I’m In Your Inner Most Part.2″ (20.24) opens with that repeated word. This piece feels a biot more like an improv with organ and the tambura rotating through.
Kawabata Makoto is credited with electric organ, electric harpsichord, violin, tambura, percussion, electronics and electric guitar on this release.
The bonus track is called “Osculation (remix version)” (15.32). I can’t tell exactly what it is remixing as it sounds like parts of both songs are melded together. There is a lot of church organ sounds and repeating motifs. But around 11 minutes a grinding noise comes into the song and start to take over until the end is just all noise.
Like most of Kawabata’s solo album, this one feels improvised and off the cuff. The inclusion of the organ however, makes this one solitary in his vast catalog.
[READ: June 13, 2020] “Man-Eating Cats”
Twenty years apart, Murakami has two surreal stories about animals. Actually, this one is far less surreal than the monkey story, but there is a supernatural component for sure.
The story opens with the narrator reading to Izumi from the newspaper. The article is about a woman who died and her cats ate her–they had been alone in the apartment for about a week with no food.
Izumi wants to know what happened to the cats, but the paper doesn’t say. She wonders if he were the town’s mayor or chief of police, would he have the cats put down? He suggests reforming them into vegetarians, but Izumi didn’t laugh at that.
Izumi then tells about when she started a Catholic school, how the nuns told the new students that if they were shipwrecked with a cat and they only had a limited amount of food, that they should not give any to the cat. Humans are precious and chosen by God while cats are not. She is still appalled, “What could possibly be the point of telling a story like that to kids who’d just started at the school?”
But this story is not only about cats. The narrator explains that two months earlier they were both living in Japan, happily married to other people.
He worked an okay job as a designer and probably would have stayed at the job forever had things not happened the way they did. He met Izumi at a business meeting. She was ten years younger than he was but they had a lot in common. It was uncanny how well they got along, “Most people go their entire lives without meeting a person like that…[it was more than love] it was more like total empathy”
They started going out regularly and then eventual wound up in bed together. They felt like they could go on with separate lives like this forever–satisfied wit their spouses and this empathetic love. No bad ending was in sight.
Until her husband found out.
Izumi suggested they pack up everything, take what money they had and move to Greece. She had always wanted to go there so he thought why not. Combined they had four million yen (about forty thousand dollars) which should keep them fine for a few years.
Thing were going well so far, but on the flight over, he had a feeling that he was losing himself–“the person sitting on that plane was no longer me.” He got the shakes and felt like he was going to die. Then it subsided and all was fine.
After she told him about her school story he told her about the cat that disappeared into thin air. Their tortoiseshell cat loved to play in the yard. One night it screeched and climbed into a tree. He watched it all night until it got dark and then never saw it again.
Izumi said it wasn’t unusual, that cats did that ll the time, but he said he was young and didn’t quite understand that. He went out every day to see if it was still in the tree.
But Izumi was no longer listening. She asked if he missed his child. He said sometimes, but that wasn’t entirely true, his child seemed to be fading from his mind. She wondered if his child would think of him like the cat that climbed a tree and disappeared.
She said that if he wanted to go back to Japan, she wouldn’t stop him. He nodded but knew it wouldn’t happen.
That night he woke in up and Izumi was not n bed with him. He went out to look for her. He followed the sound music–perhaps she heard a party and went to check it out. He wandered all around…
Just then–without warning–I disappeared
There’s a bit more but as with Murakami, things just get a bit more surreal before the ending.
[Translated by Philip Gabriel].
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