Released: August 2003
Label: Schematic Records (Miami)
Track listing:
1 - Noor (5:05)
2 - Sunset Vibe (5:02)
3 - Glow (4:48)
4 - Slowly Hours (1:52)
5 - On a Peice (5:49)
6 - Alang (4:50)
7 - Scope (6:59)
8 - Way Out (2:32)
9 - Flow (6:00)
10 - Ossk (2:06)
11 - Read Me (9:57)
12 - Rest In Peace (1:33)
Notes: This album arrived on Schematic Records door with a note attached saying "Enjoy warm noise from Japan." How cute.
"Perhaps the style of melodic IDM has been a bit over-hyped in the past few years, with new artists cropping up constantly, and group-of-the-moment status being bestowed on pretty but slight outfits like Mum, but the fact remains that when done right, this type of music can be immensely rewarding. Simply put, Kiyo does it right. This young electronic musician from Japan has dubbed his own style “warm noise” (a far better descriptor than melodic IDM, anyway) and the phrase holds true for the entire hour of his debut, Chaotech Odd Echo.
It’s hard to pinpoint, in concrete terms, exactly what sets this record apart from the legions of admittedly very similar albums floating around out there. There’s a definite emotionality to Kiyo’s work, a rich depth of feeling embedded in his soaring melodies and the dense spider webs of clicking, twitching sound with which he surrounds them. On “Flow,” just one of many highlights to be found here, he backdrops the song with a constant melodic drone, adding layers of glitchy patterns, percussion, glimmering synths, and what could be a vocal sample (or a synth distorted to sound like one) on top of this static foundation. The effect is nearly overwhelming in its emotional beauty, especially as the song builds to its sweeping closure, with a half-heard voice cooing from behind the dense wall of sound. There’s warmth and compassion in this music to be sure, a blessed lack of the distance and coldness that too often characterizes electronics.
Kiyo’s sonic palette is superficially reminiscent of Oval’s, inhabiting the same uneasy territory between gorgeous melodicism and noise, but Kiyo’s music is much more unabashedly accessible, keeping the intrusion of noise and glitch minimal. The epic “Read Me” is again built on a strong melodic base, foregrounding the clicks, pops, and Aphex-like drum smears that form the track’s rhythms. The opener “Noor” is another excellent integration of glitchy quirks with Kiyo’s underlying knack for achingly sad melodies. Shards of static and broken-off melodic fragments form a crackling, constantly alive surface as multiple layers of melody slowly combine and mutate underneath. Everything is continually shedding its skins, revealing new insides, melodies cracking open under the scalpel-like incisions of Kiyo’s crispy rhythms. This is totally enveloping, beautiful beyond belief, and what it may lack in originality is more than made up for by the fact that it completely trumps nearly every one of its predecessors in this style."
-Ed Howard Stylus Magazine
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