Sawako+: Omnibus
Community Library

Issuing Sawako's Omnibus as its inaugurating full-length may seem an idiosyncratic move on Community Library's part but it's a less audacious choice than it might first appear. Look closely and you'll notice a '+' following Sawako's name on the cover. The symbol not only intimates the collaborative involvement of numerous others but dovetails nicely with the Portland-based label's 'community-without-geography' credo. Ms. Kato, a one-time mainstay of Tokyo's art scene and current NYU graduate student, assembled a huge bank of source material (obtained from kindred spirits like Polmo Polpo, Yuichiro Fujimoto, Tu m', Yamane, Hypo, Rie, and others) and then shaped it into the ten settings collected on Omnibus.

Unfortunately, the 'full-length' is not quite twenty minutes long, making it more an EP than anything else. With only one song approaching five minutes (“Aykmin”) and the shortest a mere 8.4 seconds (“Fanfare”), getting a firm handle on Sawako's music proves difficult though it tends to favour a meandering, sometimes peaceful collage style. Throughout the disc, she intersects field noises (birds, voices) with instrument sounds, the natural sounds sometimes placed at the forefront while at others used as a backdrop for acoustic plucks and what may be toy piano and kalimba. With glimmering piano pulses bolstered by echoes of dubby clatter, “End Roll” offers perhaps the strongest compositional promise but its two-minute duration hardly allows much opportunity for said potential to be realized. Sounding like someone rapidly cutting from one radio channel to another, the spasmodically twitching “Lapon” is also memorable, but it too vanishes quickly. Omnibus would likely impress more had it complemented its fleeting fragments and vignettes with a fair share of fully-developed compositions.

October 2005