Hana

The title track of this EP inevitably dominates. Its loop of the gravity-defying Debussy / Bernard Herrmann echoing strings from Sade’s “Pearls” forms a bed for a post-human, post-gender intersection of voices (including that of Boredoms’s Yoshimi P-We) reciting… something? Which then in turn gets interlocked to microsecond precision with virtuoso tabla playing. It sound like nothing else on Earth, its nearly seven minutes feel like an eternity and an instant, and most people who know it will be able to tell you where they first heard it. It’s no wonder that – helped by a UK re-release of this EP and other tracks on the Leaf Label as Jun Ray Song Chang a year later in 2002 – it’s become an underground staple. But the rest of the 25 minutes of this EP show that it wasn’t a fluke: every moment of trombone, processed voice, crazed gamelan-style percussion, glitched loops and the rest seems to come from the same unknown dimension. No matter how many times you hear it, this still feels outside of time, influence, culture, anything.