wakka

On their debut album, wakka, minamo were a duo – Keiichi Sugimoto on guitar and computer, and Tetsuro Yasunaga on synths, percussion, and objects. It’s impressively confident for a debut album, and you can hear how immediately comfortable Sugimoto and Yasunaga are in each other’s presence. The music – which shifts between sub rosa patterns, and bursts of glitchy static and interference – sits, nicely enough, alongside then-contemporaneous music from Japan: think the material released on labels like Soup-Disk or 360° (the latter would release minamo’s next album, kgs), or perhaps the more abstract end of Childisc. You can hear the two musicians negotiating how to improvise together, and finding pleasure in the subtle interweaving of seemingly unrelated sonic incidents – there’s something trinket-like in the way they approach the sonic objects collected here.