Minamo’s Documental presents a further distillation of the Tokyo quartet’s lowercase electroacoustic folk improvisations, edited and mastered here by label boss Lawrence English. No real surprises for anyone who’s followed their decade-plus career, but as the release notes state, consistency is one of their particular strengths. Like all their releases from 2002’s .kgs on, tiny melodic details and repeated patterns are added to underlying layers of drone, building loose, filigree compositions of sharp staccato detail and warm sinuous flow. While devoted to the language of lowercase electroacoustic improv, Minamo inject a palpable sense of play and fun into their works, like the whimsical Tenniscoats jamming with hardcore Onkyo-ists.
Like the latter, Minamo are happy to explore dissonance, riffing on atonal melodies and non-musical sounds for the duration of whole tracks. The repetition of these fragments can create a sense of songlike structure, such as the 3-note guitar figure that lurches all over ‘Dusted Shelf’, which oddly suits the vague industrial whine lurking beneath. ‘Handbook’ is further disordered, seemingly haphazard gestures and miniature tones from piano, woodwind and electronics scattered like debris on a worktop, while the title of ‘Paperweight’s could refer to the single tolling piano note, haunting the piece like a ghostly bell-ringer, unfazed by the creeping string drones clutching at its heels. Essentially this is ambient music, but too filled with tiny burrs and prickles to properly lull; rather, they create a sense of pleasant inertia.
Joshua Meggitt
