Tetsu Inoue - Psycho-Acoustic (1998)

Psycho-Acoustic is a strange release for Tetsu, for more reasons than one. First, much of his discography to date has appeared on ambient, techno, and post-techno labels such as Fax, Pod, and Rather Interesting; Tzadik is an experimental music label formed by jazz iconclast John Zorn in 1995, releasing mostly jazz-freak, art-punk, noise, and contemporary compositional and computer music from artists such as David Shea, James Tenney, Masada, Ruins, Anthony Coleman, Derek Bailey, and David Slusser. Allegiances aside, however, Psycho-Acoustic also contains by far some of the strangest music of Tetsu's career. Ditching the warm, continuous tones and atmospheres of favorites such as Organic Cloud and World Receiver, Psycho-Acoustic is 40 dense, demanding minutes of experimental desktop abuse, all bleeps, bloops, hard edits, and short blasts of chrome-clean digital noise. Still, as disjointed and plastic as many of the pieces seem, echoes of Tetsu's previous concerns remain (particularly those of more outward-leaning discs such as Slow and Low); the texture-heavy "Modu Lotion" and the quirky but wonderfully engaging duet with New York drum machine composer Ikue Morie, "Tom & Tone," stand out in this respect. © Sean Cooper