The one track featured here is “Joy” off Saito Koji‘s recent album, Again, on the Resting Bell label. The album is eight tracks in all, each three minutes long, and all best experienced in sequence. The music is a series of exercises in restraint, thick washes of white noise and deep swells, all compacted and limited, so even, as with “Joy,” when they suggest something voluminous, they have a clear beginning, middle, and end — and the middle doesn’t last all that long. It’s not that they work better together, in sequences, because to say so would be to slight the composure and structure and tonality from which each track benefits. It’s just quite enticing how their steady passing, one after another, lends a sense of narrative to the proceedings, like a slide carousel of a holiday vacation in which all we see is a series of slightly-out-of-focus landscapes (MP3). Each track is just long enough to begin to consume the listener’s peripheral hearing before, flip, another begins to play.
Get the full album for free download at restingbell.net.