I wish all folk artists were like Miko. I don’t mean that I wish that they all sounded like Miko – what is great about Chandelier is that it doesn’t fit the mould of ‘folk’, in spite of having many of its familiar signposts. Yes, there is Rie Mitsutake’s gentle voice, with gentle piano, guitar and glockenspiel propping up most of the tracks. But these are only some of the many layers to explore. The soundworlds that are opened up on Chandelier are continually surprising and entertaining. I wish all folk artists were as free to explore as Miko.
The main process of Miko’s songs are to layer lots of little sounds onto each other – looped or stray – to create a spindly web in which the songs themselves are caught, trapped and just about subsumed. As the mini-album progresses, the shards of sound encountered become more and more abstract, from the free triangle tingles and snare roll skips in ‘Kikeoru’ through the backward vocal snatches and wooden drum loping in ‘Cherries’ to ‘America’s loose two note kalimba riff, tapped guitar percussion ticks and occasional whirrs of electronics which sound something like chirping crickets. The detail is staggering and expansive, especially in light of how simple and light each element feels when you concentrate on it in isolation. At other times, it’s the rhythms themselves that hypnotise. ‘Keshiki’ sways ambiguously between 3/4 and 4/4 meter, or then there’s ‘Newtown’, whose time signature I’m still not quite sure of.
Miko’s folk is informed with a sense of her own Japanese æsthetic and is sung entirely in Japanese, from what I can discern. But she uses western formats and blends the two perfectly. The music is folk at its heart, but not bound by any traditions. Her artist moniker is literally translated as ‘shaman woman’. It’s probably a horrid cliché to rest on, but there is certainly a magical quality to the beguiling manner in which these songs entrance.
Adrian Elmer
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