sawako

Bitter Sweet

Another great microsound transmission from the 12k camp, Sawako's Bitter Sweet comes as a follow-up to a string of works for And/Oar, Anticipate and 12k's own Hum (released as her debut album for the label in 2005). At her best, Sawako explores a hyper-real, spectrally filtered dreamscape of sounds, glistening in your ears to the point where it's almost overwhelming. Her bright, gleaming sound matter just floods into you, which, speaking synaesthetically, isn't entirely unlike the sensation of walking from a darkened room into the bright sunshine of a summer day. These subtly melodic soundscapes are incredibly tactile, fusing both instrumental and field recorded sources and then treating the end product with an unusual and comprehensive barrage of post-production techniques. At its best, you end up with compositions like 'April -From Sea Shell', which despite its cloyingly twee title is actually a thing of striking beauty. It doesn't always work out in such a wholeheartedly successful fashion, however. As is so often the case with 12k releases nowadays, unnecessary acoustic instrumentation threatens to tip the music into a kind of pastoral banality, never more frustratingly than on 'Utouto', whose cello and violin drones work beautifully, only to be unnecessarily augmented by slightly irritating, filtered acoustic guitar sounds, which really add nothing to the record. This kind of meandering, ornamental material just seems superfluous and brushes with an aesthetic that comes perilously close to branding itself as 'child-like', surely one of the most damning euphemisms for inconsequentiality you could ever level at an artist. This transpires to be a fairly minor blip though, barely tarnishing the track itself let alone the album as a whole. After a series of wonderfully obscure compositions, the album eventually concludes on 'Last Next', a vocal piece that toys with the idea of being an actual, proper song. To some this might come as a jarringly direct gesture on an otherwise wonderfully obscure album, but it's only fair to permit the artist this richly deserved curtain call. Highly Recommended.