Andruic & Japan 1
Minimal house is a genre that's made some artists a comfortable living via the simple philosophy of "give them an inch and they'll take a mile". There's a deeply odd disjuncture between the playful sense of humor on display in, say, Akufen and Ricardo Villalobos's work and the studied High Modernism of the music itself. Nowhere is this bizarre gap more obvious than in the Villalobos & Gillings track "Andruic & Japan" on Villalobos's recent Fabric mix. 12 minutes of unvarying house rhythm overlaid with taiko drumming and random vocalese and occasionally manic mutterings about chicken and sashimi. It's self-consciously experimental in a pop Stockhausen way (it seems evident to me, at least, that it wasn't created in a total bong haze, that there is some kind of intent behind it), but I'm not sure the underlying plan was meant to be deciphered. It all adds up to something, but what it is seems opaque, as if the creators were daring listeners to find meaning where there might be none.
Does anyone actually dance to this? And why? Its appeal seems almost exclusively intellectual, and even then on a fairly abstract plane.
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I love that track and I do dance to this, especially at home while cleaning or getting ready to go out. Andruic and Japan is a great track for this, offering plenty of distraction but not demanding your full focus. It is a pulse that gets your heart and mind in the mood for more; it is a slow buildup in the background, leading to the main-event track Primer Encuentro Latino-Americano.
It is not intellectual in the sense that one must think hard to get it. It’s easy to lose yourself in this, let your mind drift, and let your feet get caught up in the beat.
But if thinking’s your bag, there’s much to play with here. There are stories to figure out. The Andruic and the Japan are not separate tracks overlaid to form a song (Andruic occasionally makes reference to the drumming), this is the sound of something going on, an event for the imagination to figure out. Indeed it is abstract, something for the whole mind and emotions. Why dance to it? Because it can slip past conscious thought and make the rest of your person feel like dancing.