In an interview with Ryo Miyauchi for the experimental music newsletter Tone Glow, the producer and songwriter Hakushi Hasegawa is asked whether their musical process involves more addition or subtraction. “It’s like if you applied kintsugi so much that you could no longer see what the original shape of the vessel looked like,” they respond, alluding to the Japanese art of ‘golden joinery’, where broken pottery is repaired with lacquer mixed with gold.
It’s an appropriately visual metaphor for Hasegawa’s electronic maximalism, which reaches a heady peak on their new LP Mahōgakkō, their first since signing to Flying Lotus’s label Brainfeeder last year – a kaleidoscopic collision of noise, polyrhythms, smooth jazz and J-pop. Like an artist applying kintsugi, Hasegawa’s greatest skill is their ability to extract order from chaos; to make something beautiful and grounded from so many disparate parts.
At first listen, the combination of dense samples and electronics with sweet, wide-eyed melody sounds like a jarring juxtaposition, but the connections between these two ostensibly opposed elements gradually reveal themselves. Melodic elements and recognisable rhythmic patterns seem to be extracted from the maelstrom, like liquid gold poured into the cracks between tightly packed, jagged structures. ‘Departed’ crashes into life as a thick wall of electronic sound, something like the full-on assault of Sunik Kim or Fire-Toolz. But when the noise drops out, traces of sung melody are left behind. On ‘Gone’, Hasegawa lays out a complex series of overlapping rhythms as a kind of jungle gym for Japanese rapper Kid Fresino to MC around. After this subtle start, the melody is drawn in thick highlighter over the top of ‘Mouth Flash (Kuchinohanabi)’. Even when it’s confrontational, Hasegawa’s music is primarily bright and playful.
‘KYŌFUNOHOSHI’ begins as the sound of a dozen arcade games playing at once, all bangs and shouts and clipped gasps. But just as it’s getting too much, a saxophone solo emerges, constructing itself from overlapping countermelodies. ‘The Blossom and the Thunder’ is a humorous inversion of this structure, started out as blissed-out jazz-funk before being interrupted by a corny, primary-coloured trance melody – an intruder from another song.
The rapid pace of Hasegawa’s music and its subversion of pop tropes – as well as Hasegawa being Gen Z – has overlap with hyperpop. But where hyperpop often contains a bait-and-switch between earnestness and cynicism, there’s no such tension here: this is music made entirely of generosity and enthusiasm, not counteraction and opposition. ‘Forbidden Thing (Kimmotsu)’ centres around an impossibly fast piano part, reminiscent of Kelly Moran’s recent experiments with self-playing pianos, programmed to play parts that no human could possibly play. This superhuman accompaniment is employed to serve pure emotionality: a poignant sung lament, with a melody like a ‘70s soft rock ballad. ‘Boy’s Texture’ is similarly dreamily sentimental, matched somehow fittingly with the crunchiest of beats. As a chorus of taunting voices squeal “taste me, taste me, taste me!” it’s as though the aural feast transposes into parallel tastes and textures: salty, crispy, creamy, acidic, all at once.
Hasegawa’s signing to Brainfeeder also invites comparisons with the label’s existing roster – artists like Jameszoo, Ross From Friends and Salami Rose Joe Louis, who all, like Hasegawa, wring magic from chaos and unpredictability. Hasegawa has cited Brainfeeder’s Thundercat as an influence, telling Crack magazine that, “he is always telling me how many unexamined subjects are hidden in what is considered as already studied.” This shared sensibility can be heard in Mahōgakkō’s mining of chord progressions, structures and harmonics from genres as disparate as ‘90s Japanese pop, acid jazz, jungle and speed metal.
The songs on Mahōgakkō are overflowing, threatening to burst with their abundent contents, but Hasegawa’s sound design is meticulous: at its best, each element of a track feels intentional, an essential part of the song’s personality. The only moments on the twelve track album that feel surplus to requirements are the few songs that don’t have a strong enough sense of internal logic to draw all their elements together. These are the tracks that feel most like interludes – like ‘NENNEKOKOROMI’, which sounds like repeated ideas, or ‘Enbami’, which consists of sounds being tested out prematurely, without a centre of gravity. There’s countless producers who can make a busy string of noises sound half-interesting, but Hasegawa’s rarer talent lies in the way they can draw hooks and structure from them.
Mahōgakkō isn’t just significant as it’s Hasegawa’s first album for Brainfeeder, but because it marks the first time they have shown their face, and revealed the person behind the mercurial music they have been making since they were a teenager, and releasing since their 2018 debut EP Somoku Hodo. Their early releases came with rumours about who was responsible for such dazzling, maddening music – was ‘Hakushi Hasegawa’ a pseudonym for a more established artist? Surely such multitudinous music could only be made by several people working under one name?
Listening again and again to Mahōgakkō, its abundance, mayhem and unpredictability feel more and more representative of the chaos and contradiction inherent to being a person – the way you can change your mind, think five different things at once, feel like a dozen different people at the same time, but somehow connected by the containment of your own body, your own life. Ultimately it’s a subjective record: each listener is sure to draw different connections, be compelled towards different elements – like how no two bowls repaired with kintsugi could ever look alike.
