Yu Miyashita has some involvement with the revived Mille Plateaux and viewing his music as an extension of the abstract glitch pioneered by the Frankfurt label makes sense. Direct lineage can be traced from Miyashita’s work on An Arc back to some of Mille Plateaux’s prime movers: Fennesz, Tim Hecker, Sebastian Meissner and Wolfgang Voigt, Miyashita’s work a contemporary reconfiguration of the white noise datasea that glitch attempted to explore.
While the glitch pioneers tended to favour a stripped down minimalism, Miyashita takes advantage of advances in processing power to create maximalist symphonies of jittery orchestral samples, granular synthesis and dense textural wash. Many of the sounds created are indeed beautiful, swathes of grey dubbed out haze reminiscent of Tim Hecker and Fennesz, but their restlessness, the manner in which they constantly crash against other elements, makes the overall result unsettling. At times these ruptures are rhythmic, like an ice-cold version of The Field, but their abrasiveness is closer to Klimek’s Movies is Magic. An Arc may be rougher and less emotionally satisfying than that masterpiece, but his complex creations are well crafted and worth checking.
Joshua Meggitt
