These last few days have left me feeling like I live in the armpit of a housecat. And not the kind that gets to roam the streets like a king, picking up second and third dinners from nieve and well-meaning families who it keeps secrete from its real owners. I mean the kind that barely notices when a bird lands outside the living room window or the smoke detector gets triggered in the kitchen because it sleeps sixteen hours a day on a messy thrown of blankets left to accumulate on the floor of a wardrobe closet. I mean, I don't get out like I used to, but I at least thought I was keeping up with the "cool" underground electronic and DIY acts by sifting through the ether of the internet for an hour or two per day. Yet, here comes Emamouse, like the emissary of a wasteland-savaging, road warrior tribe, zipping over the dunes to wreck my shit! Alright, I'm exaggerating a bit here. Emamouse is, by all measures, a creature of kindness. Somewhat shy and insular, the Tokyo producer's hallmark is an elasticity of structure that stretches far beyond what is typical of even the most adventurous electronic artists. As evidence for my claim, I could just point to the artist's most recent release カミナリマッパ (Kaminari Mapper), an album which sees the artist tortiously fluctuating the speed of previously released tracks until they become as blurry and mystifying opaque as the dust-congested skies above the Mint 400. A record like that is obviously a bit of a stunt, a dare-devil feat to test the limits of one's work as well as the dedication of one's audience to it. I'm more interested in the oddities that can be salvaged from one of their more straightforward releases like FiRe. The seemingly innocuous seven-track EP begins abruptly, almost mid-groove, with the digital diamond-belted shatter-splash of compressed glass-fiber techno, a track they dub "9," and which winds down to create a base layer of combustible material from which the title track can draft off from a break-beat busted collage of electro-hip hop hammer sequences and comically catchy vocal loops that foretell what Afrika Bambaataa could accomplish with the right Schwarzenegger samples and a properly preserved Sega Game Gear speaker array. This is all well and good, but an unusual shift of priorities occurs once we reach the midway mark of the album and "Distorted Bayer song" has a chance to display its wares. Here Emamouse power-downs, disentangles and readjusts to realize the veneer of a latent petite baroque savant, prudently plucking out an obscure melody on a toy-like piano as if trying to decipher the vernacular of a dream-invading fey through the magic of sound, a weird firmament by which the artist then molds the catchy composite of hooks and verbose melodies that comprises the wishful thrumming ambiance of "ϒ ϒϒ ϒϒ." The two previous styles established on the record- the disjointed dance numbers and the heavy-hearted outsider pop- then collapse back into each other, like a double trust fall, merging their auras like colliding waterfalls on the remaining tracks, coalescing into the kinetic empyrean skylight that is "さようならフライパン," followed by "∞" a singular strand of hyper-sensational sheen and starlight etching tool employed to burn a message across the broadside of your soul. I've heard that Emamouse's music is for people who have very little interest in the outside world, and I can see why now. They offer an overwhelming kind of eclecticism, one that shocks you with its splintered coherence and comforts you with its varying and diverse affordances and concessions to indefatigable reverie. It's the kind of music that clears a sonic space that you can easily get lost in, and that you might find it difficult to separate yourself from. At least it feels that way for me. As it is, I'm not feeling so estranged by my shiftless, feline-approximate existence, not so long as I have FiRe to keep me cozy.
