The author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once said “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
This unexpected blueprint for minimalism first appeared in his book Airman’s Odyssey in 1942, and it’s true that in art, design, music, and elsewhere – that you can say more with less. Removing everything extraneous until you are only left with the very essence of the idea.
This exacting precision seeps out every pore on this stunning new release by Japanese sound artist Fujita Yosuke who records under the initially over-elaborate seeming name FUJI|||||||||||TA. Those 10 vertical bars, a glyph used in mathematics, computing and typography, and sometimes referred to as a pipe – however, quickly becomes a wonderfully succinct umbrella to hang the whole project under.
In the last 15 or so years, FUJI|||||||||||TA has made several albums combining subtle field recordings, electronics and a self-made pipe organ. The music is always conveying some sense of a universal glue where sounds react in natural spaces, and other sounds intermingle in unforced but deeply touching ways. The duet between his pipe organ and bats in a cave from 2020’s KŌMORI could easily be an avant-garde tape assemblage, as much as a documentary recording of sounds simply co-existing poetically in space.
His new album MMM, however feels like a subtle but ultimately monumental step forward in his glorious sonic world. Over 3 tracks, we move directly into the actual musicality, and alchemy of sound. Centred again on his pipe organ, this time set up with an electric rather than hand pump, FUJI|||||||||||TA physically moves around the instrument with a gun microphone. All the harmonics, overtones, sound blossoming into space, waves, ripples, all navigated in some tantalising flythrough. An alien world hiding in plain sight.
The first and longest piece, 21 minutes of M-1 is a mapping out of this landscape, which channels the listener’s brains and ears, and invites them into tiny vortices and panoramas. Sound rendered as vibrations, patterns and pulses drawn out in geometric oddness. The effect is something that could easily sit somewhere between Harry Bertoia sound sculptures, the warm throb of Folke Rabe’s What??, Steve Reichs’ phases or Lichen’s The Psychic Nature Of Being. Pure cold science and sonic phenomena, encased in artistic curiosity and warmth.
However, M-2 immediately does something that even on a first listen absolutely dazzles. A similar exploration of sonic treasures but this time FUJI|||||||||||TA zones in on his own voice. A form of vocalisation somewhere between hyperventilation and stroboscopic psychedelics. Rhythms enmesh and bloom into endless expansions. It’s a barber shop quartet spiked with thumping techno as the whole thing continually shifts through a mirage of possibilities. Brief sections here feel like albums worth of material that could easily regenerate out this bubbling creative excellence.
The third and final piece M-3 is an overlap between the two previous tracks but far from simply overlapping two threads, it quickly forms into another rarefied space. A stretched-out stew of vocal tones and heat hazed drones, arranged into a filmic widescreen space.
MMM continually draws out of such simplicity, it can’t help reminding you of so many other things, whilst sounding like nothing else – amorphous but also exacting. It’s 41-minute runtime is a quite spectacular listen that’s looped effortlessly for hours of our springtime days.
Music like this is a timely reminder that ultimately any notion of perfection is quite simple. Music is just organised sound, and when it’s explored and this well-handled, it transforms into something deeply fundamental and beautiful -a real-life magic. FUJI|||||||||||TA’s discography is full of examples of just that exacting balance, but MMM somehow goes even further – this new release is an opportunity to capture an artist at their absolutely zenith.
MMM is out now on Hallow Ground on vinyl and digital
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