PRICE:
$32.00
IN STOCK
ARTIST
TITLE
Heart Fresh
FORMAT
LP

LABEL
CATALOG #
TAL 030LP TAL 030LP
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
3/29/2024

Yuko Kureyama returns to TAL with the album Heart Fresh, her first ever full-length release under her Kopy moniker. All tracks for the album were recorded in Tokyo in June 2023 at the famous live house Ochiai Soup. For the recordings of the ten tracks, Ochiai Soup was swiftly converted into a recording studio as the intimate atmosphere of the club and its perfect room acoustics gave Kopy the chance to record her music like in a live situation. Amazingly Kopy's instrumentation on Heart Fresh consists only of a Jomox x Base 09 rhythm machine and an Elektron Digitakt mini sampler. In the hands of Kopy this fairly basic and common gear creates an unmistakably intuitive and original approach to drum programming, which is recognizably her very own. Heart Fresh seems even more focused, urgent, and ambitious than its predecessors, the Paredo EP, the Eternal EP (TAL 024EP, 2021), and the split album Super Mild (TAL 015CD, 2019). Nothing on Heart Fresh is subdued. The entire production is resonating with its peculiar frequencies, it is wonderfully evocative, open hearted, full of life and intelligence. The album opens with "Night Sarkas" with quirky snare rolls played against slashing, nervy chunks of melody. Samples of organ and chimes evoke a rollercoaster spinning out of tune and synch. "Hole Hole" is a beat driven and melody free short story for bass drum, snare and hi hat with constantly changing bpm's. "TIR TONE" marks the arrival of annunciatory rhythm patterns and a lovely sprinkling of distorted synths. The album's final track "Moonlight Pool" is the perfect closer for an album of taut, free-wheeling figurations of meter and tone, a nod to classical ambient music as well as to contemporary more experimental digressions. However, the album's most startling and unexpected moments come when Kopy follows her futuristic inclinations and matches them with dissonant excoriations that shuttle the mind into a completely different place where all kinds of different activities seem to follow their own individual compasses.