The genre-fluid music of Osaka-based sorceress Tujiko Noriko has long played footsie with unearthly beauty but her empyrean new album is something else entirely, a masterpiece of weightless ambient worldbuilding that mines the same rarefied strata as canonical landmarks like ‘Selected Ambient Works Volume II’ and ‘The Disintegration Loops’. Fittingly dedicated to late Editions Mego head Peter Rehberg, ‘Crépuscule’ stakes its claim to transcendence from the first crystalline note of its mammoth 106-minute runtime, Noriko stretching skywards to lacerate the exosphere allowing rivulets of polychromatic sound to bleed through. Wintery electronics that glisten like starlit icicles form the bedrock of tracks like early highlight ‘The Promenade Vanishes’, yet the primary source of their massive gravitational field is Noriko’s extraordinary voice, a seraphic bliss-blitzed soprano, light as a hummingbird feather, impactful as a howitzer shell. Wisely, she deploys its magic sparingly, punctuating her airborne exhalations with lacunae of nebulous drift, the sound spread so thin at certain points, it’s a micron away from absolute silence. As Crépuscule turns for home, its beatific dreamscapes begin to distend and take on a darker, more amorphous form that demands deep and attentive listening. ‘Golden Dusk’, for example, blends fractured peals of luminescent synth with a plethora of apparently incongruous field recordings (shrieking toddlers, the distant rush of wind) to head-spinning effect, and by the time closing epic ‘Don’t Worry, I’ll Be Here’ fades to black, the sense of rapt disorientation is almost palpable. It may seem premature to hail ‘Crépuscule’ as ambient music’s new high-water mark, but aficionados of the beatless arts should set sail for its gilded archipelago without delay. Sublime.
Editions Mego
GonzoKaraoke 