Tamaru is a Japanese musician playing bass, delay and volume pedal. His bass guitar is tuned in a standard tuning E.A.D.G. to keep everything pretty much basic and let the sounds of the bass do the work.
Since 1997 he has been working with this setting not changing anything. His second release with this project (he is also active in several other ones) is called Figure and is released by the new Japanese label Trumn.
The already mentioned basic set-up is the first you notice on this release. Layers of the bass guitar are built upon each other at times forming drones.
The music is fully concentrating on the harmonics and over-tones that are produced by this layering of sounds. All changes are in such slow pace that any change is hardly to notice, not to say that in some pieces this is completely absent.
The first two pieces on the release are pretty much similar to each other, only difference are the notes/tones used and the length of the pieces.
The third piece Stream drifts slightly away from the harmonic drones and lies a focus on a short piece that has been delayed throughout the whole song. Between the played notes there is space enough for other notes to come in. So loops are added out of phase to make everything drift away. Again changes are really slow in such a way that after half the piece you get the idea and nothing more happens.
In the fifth piece the music finally gets some more interesting. Cathedral shows an interesting progression between the phasing patterns. The track is again on the long side, but because of the use of a wider frequency spectrum there is enough happening so you don't have to skip to the end.
Thought is probably the most interesting piece of the whole album, because it breaks away from the low-frequency dronening and layering of loops the most. The bass is being mangled in such a way that the result forms a more granular effect. Compared with the other tracks the pitch of the tones changes really fast resulting in a slightly psychedelic set.
Though, after this piece we fall back to the slow phasing harmonics which leaves me skipping through it quite fast already after the second time listening to it.
Figure is an album based on simplicity, but because of this it fell in to a trap. Tamaru made a rather boring album which shows a lack of inspiration. Layering of sounds can be nice, but next time some attention to composition could make it a much prettier end result. |
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