Noble’s abilities to uncover the more interesting end of post-pop electronica from Japan’s various urban centres has placed them firmly on the radar of labels and musicians outside Japan alike. Their latest discovery is Midori Hirano, a trained player who has converted a love for piano into an album of soaring melodic pastures, folk-like vocalisations, placid field recordings and pulsing rhythmic passages. The majority of this issue are more welcoming than other artists working with the same ingredients. In fact there’s a highly consumable edge to this record, a familiarity, but yet an oblique blur to the conventions of song and sound produced here. ‘Inori’, with it’s buried and breathy vocal brings to mind some of the more American and European free-folk acts – the prominent violin offering a centre for the flickering percussive bursts and gusts of white noise. Collaborating closely with Tico Moon member Toshiko Kageyama and Atsuko Hatano (who plays the cellos and violins featured on the disc), this document is one that will appeal to anyone who has enjoyed the sounds from Noble thus far. It’s a welcome debut release that shows potential for a future riddled with more complicated interplays between acoustic and digital sources.
Lawrence English
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