The Future Eve feat. Robert Wyatt: KiTsuNe / Brian The Fox
flau

At first glance, KiTsuNe / Brian The Fox would appear to be a recent collaboration between Japanese producer The Future Eve (Tomoyasu Hayakawa, also known as Th and, earlier, Tomo Akikawabaya) and UK legend Robert Wyatt (one-time member of Soft Machine and Matching Mole); in fact, the story's not so simple. Hayakawa first contacted Wyatt in 1998, asking him if he might have any new material the electronic producer could work on; Wyatt responded by sending him four short takes of music he'd recorded directly to tape at home and titled “Brian The Fox” (a later version appeared on his 2003 album Cuckooland under the title “Tom Hay's Fox”). Hayakawa added layers of sound to the material and with more treatments added by Takaaki Hanya (his partner in the duo project Beata Beatrix) this initial set was finished two years later (though not formally released until 2014). Yet after the set was completed, Hayakawa began to see more possibilities for creative exploration, which resulted in a second treatment, this one named “Ring Version” and comprising eight tracks. Conveniently for listeners and collectors alike, flau's double-disc release pairs the original, twenty-four-minute release with the almost forty-minute second set.

An eight-minute setting begins the original, four-track release with minimal electronic drones swathed in shimmering electronic flourishes, the sound design ice-cold and metallic, until the entrance of Wyatt's unmistakable voice effects a tonal shift. His presence brightens the material, though not so much that the chill of the electronic textures fades from view. Things turn ghostly for the second track, which couples spectral voices, Wyatt's keyboard, and warbly electronics for a nightmarish sci-fi exercise whose merciless wails play like desperate transmissions from another galaxy. The third track offers a soothing antidote to the second, with this one alleviating the abrasive electronic gestures with angelic wordless vocalizing. The final track's a fifty-second postscript that offsets Wyatt's voice with string plucks and those by-now-familiar wails.

Despite the passage of time between them, the second disc is complementary to the first. Connecting the two parts are elements common to both: Wyatt's vocal emerges at different times and in different forms, and the sound design similarly perpetuates some of the unsettling character of the original set. All forty seconds of track two are devoted to one more playback of his original vocal, for example, and the third scatters electronic contortions of various kinds across a dark, droning undertow. The “Ring Version” is, however, slightly more meditative in tone and ambient-styled in presentation, its restrained presentation consistent with material Hayakawa generated not long after his mother's passing (by his own admission, the work was created during a time when his thoughts turned to topics such as reincarnation and eternity). One of the things that makes the set so interesting is that the eight pieces don't simply riff on the same theme; instead, vocal and instrumental experiments are juxtaposed, with an unaccompanied Wyatt seemingly dueting with himself on the fourth track followed by a desolate and rather convulsive soundscape, settings as different in presentation as could be imagined (the two styles merge on the concluding track when choral exhalations blend with electronic drones). Indicative of just how far afield the material travels, the seventh track could even be mistaken for an early version of Ingram Marshall's Fog Tropes.

March 2019