Album: Haco & Hiromichi Sakamoto

Ash in the Rainbow, ReR Megacorp

This delightful album pairs the avant-pop vocalist and synthesist Haco, once of the Japanese experimentalists After Dinner, with the ambient soundscaper and cellist Hiromichi Sakamoto, in a lopsided but entirely successful "virtual collaboration". It is, in effect, a remix of Sakamoto's 1999 instrumental album Zero Shiki, to which Haco has added lyrics, vocal melodies and electronics, the results edited down to a series of exquisite, experimental art-pop songs that should appeal to fans of Björk and Stina Nordenstam. None more so than the title track, in which cello, bowed saw and reversed drum-machine and vibes tones carry a lyric about the impermanence of beauty, how such things are just "dreams with nowhere to go". A delicate, gossamer piece of subtle melodic hints, it has a rarefied beauty of its own. The instrumental "Sign of the Seahorse" has a similarly light presence – just a heartbeat, a few music-box glissandi and some furtive cello – while the pizzicato and tiny percussion of "Standard Smile" has a meditative, Satie-esque quality. Haco's songs have an abstract, Zen-like grace, and "Zero Hills" is perhaps the most effective confluence of lyric and music, its inquisitive pizzicato and eerie bowed saw perfectly reflecting the song's theme of a retreat to a more spiritual realm. Highly recommended.