Imagine stacking CD cases up like dominos, extending infinitely into the horizon. Imagine each one, after knocking over the subsequent one, physically and sonically melting into a puddle as it comes to rest. The resulting miles-long goo would have the musical tone and texture of Yoshinori Hayashi‘s The End of the Edge. It’s a literal melting pot of sounds and styles, coalescing into a syrupy, hazy, and brilliant record. Hayashi’s new EP carries an air of the apocalypse; a soundtrack to the death of music. Its vinyl listing on Juno labels it “deep house,” which feels comically, woefully inadequate and off-base.
The End of the Edge lies somewhere between jazz/lounge fusion and woozy house music, performed by a live band on mushrooms. There’s little that feels inorganic here, even the looping seagull sample on “Madam Moo,” while clearly digitally manipulated, end up as a hypnotic natural element in a clambering song. Hayashi is masterful when it comes to manipulating samples to mold a mood. On the same track, samples of buzzing bees, mumbling voices and watery wooden percussion lend the listener visions of tropical locales, thoughts dancing like a psychedelic capoeira.
The synthy choir on “A Castle” finds itself at odds with a chugging beat, eventually melding through reverb and echo into a fine paste cut through with indistinguishable string instruments flailing wildly. “Geckos” has one of the more solid grooves you’ll hear all year, its counterpoint being an ambling, atonal piano that sort of stumbles around the beat like a lounge pianist in the penultimate stage of an Ambien-induced sleep.
Hayashi’s compositions are frustrating in the most delightful way, in the sense that they take wholly familiar ideas and distort them into fractured, alien remnants of what they were before. It’s often hard to distinguish the live instrumentation and the programmed material, like the saxophone melody on “Madam Moo” that sounds either cavernous or canned out of a keyboard depending on your mood. “Carcass of Tags” literally sounds like it has two different drum tracks playing on top of one another, like someone forgot to match the beats on their turntables. It feels like a challenge to DJs: “Try and get away with playing this one.”
Hayashi nestles himself historically between composers who love to distort reality into alternate timelines. Angelo Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks soundtrack feels like a strikingly similar, if not less dance-oriented comparison. Nobuo Uematsu’s Final Fantasy VII soundtrack plays with similar synths and jazzy grooves in the more urban environments of the game. And now Yoshinori Hayashi swoops in on retro-futurist nostalgia a lá vaporwave and cuts it down to size. I don’t even know what edge he’s specifically referring to, but it feels like the end of something.
The End of the Edge is out now via Going Good Records.