Kumi Takahara: See-Through
flau

After years of contributing to the projects of others, Tokyo-born violinist Kumi Takahara presents an expansive personal vision on her debut album. While she's classically trained (she graduated at the top of her class at the Kunitachi College of Music), See-Through isn't a classical album in any formal sense of the term, though it does form part of the soil out of which her material grows.

The album's ten settings play like Takahara rendered into musical form. A broad span of emotions is encompassed, with these fragile, diary-like pieces ranging from melancholy and nostalgia to joy and wonder. Simple piano motifs pair with string melodies in the songs, Takahara sometimes enhancing the arrangement with soft vocals and found sounds. “Artegio” and “Kai-kou” impress as gentle violin-and-piano reveries that reflect her classical background, the latter a particularly lovely illustration of the artistry of which she's capable; as memorable is “Chant” for the lovely string patterns that course through its dream-like flow.

Titles at times intimate the character and mood of the piece in question, with “Chime” using a familiar doorbell-like figure as a springboard and “Nostalgia” as wistful as expected. After a gentle pairing of violin and piano is augmented by water noises in “Sea,”“Tide” perpetuates the idea with a dramatically expressive soundscape of oceanic sweep. See-Through ends with a slow, heavily atmospheric exercise that could as easily have been titled “Drowsy” as “Log.”

Separate from the release are three remixes, with two distancing themselves noticeably from the forty-two-minute album. Whereas Dylan Henner transforms the child-like innocence of “Ditty” into an ever-blossoming, synthesizer-dominated dreamscape, Earth Trax ventures boldly away from See-Through with a heavy, beat-thudding version of “Tide”; of the three, it's Zoe Polanski's quietly majestic “Roll” treatment that aligns itself closest to Takahara's vision. In the final analysis, there's nothing objectionable about the makeovers, but the album itself offers significant enough rewards on its own.

February 2021