Kyoto-based singer and songwriter NTsKi has been working on her debut album since at least 2016 when she was still living in the UK. Traveling the oceans and learning to survive in a global pandemic have not unsettled her sense of place or self though, and her album Orca is remarkably self-contained for having coalesced during a period the intense disruption and upheaval.
Orca is a reflection on a lot of things- from the natural world to the nurturing aspects of friendship- but it is most notably in conversation with Miharu Koshi's 1984 album Parallelism (the title track of which she covers on the album). Miharu's work is rightfully described as evocative, opening up a space for European, specifically French, jazz and contemporary composition into the world of Japanese pop music. It is campy. It is aggressively irreverent. And it is humorously, avant-gardist. Miharu's work takes up the entirety of the space with which it is given, and captures and preoccupies the whole of the listener's attention as if they were attending a performance of a play or opera- a space where the audience is entirely subject to the whims of the players and their exhibition. In other words, while you are listening to Parallelism, you are living within its world for as long as it is spinning on your turntable.
Orca in contrast, is more of an album that travels with you like a companion, rather than swallowing you whole like a great whale. It borrows many of the bantering, tubular synth resonances and modulations from Miharu's and other's works, and turns them inward, not in an implosion or disappearing act, but rather in a shrinkwrapping process around a specific artifact in order to define its outline and give it body. This artifact being domestic-oriented j-pop and R'nB, the kind that can be made on a laptop positioned on a coffee table, atop a stack of books, or even in a closet, balanced precariously on a pair of flannel-clad knees.
These popular but secluded forms are ones that NTsKi gives a spiritual infusion of passion and character to, and they definitively come alive under the heat of her touch. Orca is, therefore, less an absurdist and reality-cracking production, and more like a humble and conversational húsvættir- a familiar that travels in your purse or pocket, infused with the scents or sounds of home. Or, less paranaturally, like a house cat that sits in your lap, pinning you to a piece of furniture while you're preparing to leave- summoning an appraisal of your own desires and motivations, and ensuring that you will take a bit of them with you when you go. Orca will either keep you here, or enable you to take here, there- wherever there might be.
Orca, is a creature whose languid demeanor and purposeful passivity cut through the artifice around it- focusing the real and immediate and clearing the air of external pressure and far-off objectives. NTsKi's soft and pliant vocalizations, in formation and flow with the dazzling, flight and fancy of the score, are spectacularly received but not obtrusive to thought- providing a focal point for contemplation, while not obscuring a sense of presentness in the process- even when it resembles a prism bursting under hydraulic pressure.
What NTsKi has done here is a trick of transformation, where alienness becomes a lens to uncover the forgotten in the familiar, and the familiar becomes a passage through the distortions of a chaotic world. Orca will be your pet- a cherished Cheshire companion to a curious encounter with the self in a world that is seemingly always changing, and where the human desire for connection and understanding of the self are the only constants.
