Marihiko Hara & Polar M: Dance
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It's risky titling an album Dance when such a move naturally engenders expectations of a techno or house set—which this second collaboration from Kyoto-based Marihiko Hara and Polar M (Masumi Muranaka) most assuredly is not. More reminiscent of a City Centre Offices than Tresor release, the album's ten pieces perpetuate the pretty folktronica style of the duo's 2013 debut, Beyond, with acoustic piano and Muranaka's guitars (electric and acoustic) prominently featured and a spoken word performance by Mia Cabalfin included on the title track.
So why call it Dance? While touring in the wake of Beyond's release, Hara and Muranaka collaborated with choreographers and a few years ago were commissioned to compose new material for a dance performance. With such dance-related projects swirling in their heads, the concept for the duo's sophomore album began to take shape and a broader appreciation of the meanings associated with ‘dance' ensued: in addition to its literal meaning, the word also can apply to activities beyond the stage, things like seasonal changes, the rhythms of everyday life, walking, biking, cooking—life, in other words.
There's much to recommend the duo's tasteful melding of neo-classical, ambient, folk, and jazz on the forty-seven-minute release, not to mention the attention to detail they bring to the songs' arrangements (see the resplendent “Ocean of Night” as a particularly fine example). An early highlight, “The Season Changes” is swoonworthy in the extreme, especially when the duo's radiant sound escalates in grandeur during the choruses and jazz guitar shadings imbue the material with a rather Dictaphone-like character. Traces of classical minimalism emerge in the ostinato piano and guitar patterns coursing through “Ray of Light,” as does a hint of jazz in the solo piano flourishes, whereas the hushed “Monologue” and hymnal “Gone Gone Gone” eschew beats for meditative displays of Muranaka's delicate electric guitar ruminations.
The title track can't help but feel like an outlier of sorts when it's the album's sole non-instrumental, but the words spoken by Cabalfin, a contemporary dancer from Philippines, are also unusual: excerpted from José Rizal's nineteenth-century novel Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not), the lines “Damned was the womb that bore you! Dance or I'll whip you to death!” can't help but raise an eyebrow, though no doubt they're less cryptic when read in their original context. Rich in electronically enhanced textures and electric guitar shadings, Hara and Muranaka's music soothes and charms in equal measure as it advances through its effectively balanced programme of melancholy ambient reveries and spirited beat-based instrumentals. Even when Dance is at its most unassuming, the refinement, craft, and elegance of the pair's music is never in doubt.June 2018