Yasushi Miura

I received these three albums from Yasushi Miura and as I listened, I discounted the music as a failed attempt at hard techno a few years too late. There was something that kept pulling me back to these discs, perhaps the fact that it came all the way from Japan. Nevertheless, I kept listening to Miura’s cacophonic and spastic tracks, searching for the deeper design within the dense compositions. New Type 3001 emerged as my favourite album out of the bunch even though all three are quite similar in many ways. Miura’s magic lies in production and the way that the songs are mixed down, where many distinct elements fade in and out in a manner similar to how a DJ would mix vinyl, embedding a very fluid and live feeling to these glitchy electronics. Also, while most hard techno either grates or pounds, Miura’s interpretation whirls seemingly infinite sound sources into a complex frenzy that is not unlike Akufen meets Jeff Mills or Surgeon with a bit of Aphex Twin influence. There is a certain quality of this music that lends itself to amphetamine abuse — a strangely attractive yet anxious, headachy mess of noise. Now that hard techno is over, Yasushi Miura’s work provides a memorable last laugh and a final spasm of E-ed up energy as the morning sun peeks through the skylights to blind the warehouse massive back into reality.