TAKAHIRO MUKAI
“The Ideal Ruins” C40 (Hylé Tapes)




 Do we call Takahiro Mukai prolific now? He’s released eight tapes in the past two years, among other things, so I think it’s safe to say he’s going through a creative streak. I’ve even reviewed him on this very blog before. I know you want to relive his Telly, Washer & Fridge release on Entertainment Systems, because we’re all in this together.

The Osaka musician has found a newish home for this release, our old standby Hylé Tapes (and dang, they’re the excellent-est). I wrote before about how Mukai’s music would be perfect for seasick, alternate-gravity-pressure dancefloors (or at least something along those lines), and he’s proving my intuitions right yet again. This is awesome dubby-steppy weirdness, if everything was coated in soap bubbles and slowed down to tub-drain speed. This is dance music for MOMA installations, and it only gets as fast and crazy as “#236” and “#244” allow it to. (Numbers only for TM’s song titles.)

Yeah, this is modern art as recognized and configured in sound waves, and it points to the future. Mukai’s harnessed his synthesizer rig and wrangled it into an abstract wilderness where East meets West in a psionic global showdown. He is the MC of the event, and he is only in our minds. We’re on the brink of total annihilation, and The Ideal Ruins is the soundtrack piped in from another reality to hasten the action.

Maybe that’s what he’s insinuating by his title, The Ideal Ruins, that we’re dancing in our reconfigured postapocalyptic bodies upon the grave of modern civilization. We’re beyond everything, and this is what’s left. Fortunately, Takahiro Mukai has survived to make everything a little more pleasant. Or maybe he was never actually here in the first place.




--Ryan Masteller