Foodman Yasuragi Land

Foodman is Takahide Higuchi, from Nagoya, in central Japan. After remixing Jessy Lanza's `Alexander' last year, `Yasuragi Land' is his first release for Hyperdub, alive with Footwork-inspired musical freedom and the sense that everything is a rhythm. Unusually, `Yasuragi Land' has no bass. Instead, the album is breezy and refined; hyper-rhythmic music, made with a few simple tools, dances around your head. `Yasuragi' and `Parking Area' feel like gently deconstructed acoustic jazz, while `Ari Ari' is deep house splattered with a cartoonish hiccup. `Hoshikzu Tenboudai' and `Shiboritate' bounce around the speakers like trance-inducing polyrhythmic updates of the New York minimalists, programmed past human limits. `Food Court' is busy with mechanical rhythm and naive melodies, `Gallery Café' pairs a cute wooden flute melody with micro edited wooden drums, `Michi No Eki' is like a digital take on Magma's complex rock, and `Sanbashi' indirectly approximates 80s R&B. The album ends on `Misyuku', with a treated guitar lick sounding like it was stolen from Daft Punk, woven into dense interlacing drums.