Yximalloo: Unpop

Yximalloo is a comet streaking across the societal landscape. The fact that for over a decade he has dallied every now and then to pour mirth and scorn on a world so absorbed by commercialism that it has begun to devour itself may now seem prophetic. His work is elegantly absurd and hypnotic. It occupies the very edge of the artistry where mirrors reflect the insanity of materialism. It is real and it is also a parody of the swathe of the bright commercialism that attracts human sensibilities like the proverbial fly to paper.

This iconoclastic Japanese solo artist has been plowing a lonely furrow for over a decade, but has stepped in from the cold with Unpop, his first record produced for mass release. He may not be the first experimentalist to use electronics to make a musical statement—Sun Ra and several others have done so rather successfully in the past. But no one has put a match to electronica the way he has, turning it into a sonic boom. On this record he does more than merely serve notice that commercialism is like a bright shiny metallic animal that is feeding on the very human beings that feed on it.

Yximalloo may be funny—and much of the music is humorous in a robotic sort of way—but it is also deadly serious in a Dadaist sort of way. To that extent he combines a graphic sensibility with a musical one, becoming a sort of cubical Dadaist himself. Or perhaps not... for it seems he is just as likely to weave a tapestry of electronic sound as to deconstruct it. As a result, he is just as likely to ascend as to descend, like a Duchamp or a Maurits Escher. However he perceives himself, he is apt to make an about-face and present an exact opposite of what he postulates.

This record progresses in a superbly zigzag manner as it crosses a path less-traveled, but always holding up a sonic mirror in which appears society that is—almost in a binary fashion—busy eating away at itself.