Sugai Ken ‎- Tele-N-Tech-Da (2018)

Sugai Ken keeps us rapt to his genuinely idiosyncratic sound with Tele-N-Tech-Da; a playfully psychedelic computer music suite inspired by ancient Japanese culture and customs.

Like his trifecta of aces released by EM Records, Lullabies For Insomniacs and Rvng Intl since 2016, this album is perceptibly trippy no matter which way you approach it.

Tele-N-Tech-Da appears to be Ken’s attempt at broadening and inhabiting the schism between history/tradition and a form of pure artistic expression unhindered by the weight of historicity. To give some grasp of the results, the artist likes to think of them as “…like an imaginary radio play”, and we’d expand that to an imaginary radio play from another dimension, heard on a cranky DAB with a life of its own, thanks to the album’s brilliantly freeform, abstract logic.

Finding a perfect home on Discrepant, lodged amid Pierre Bastien and Kink Gong records, Ken really takes the opportunity to cut loose, at times sounding like esoteric Coil experiments, and at others like a Sublime Frequencies transmission from parallel planes, ultimately leaving us baffled but ready to try and navigate a way back thru it all.