His eighth full-length release and intended as a non-linear, non-uniform and non-conventional tribute to the traditional music of Krush’s homeland, Japan, ‘Jaku’ finds the prickly, stubborn and generously experimental producer doffing his cap to both Eastern and Western music logic. Ominous, dark but glowing with flickering, musky embers this is as far removed from hip-hop per sae, as sushi is from sausages. Not world-music exactly, not rap music exactly but nor is it the desperately percussive raincloud of ethnic rocktronica espoused by the likes of Peter Gabriel & Sting (even if tracks like ‘The Beginning’, ‘Transition’ and jazz/reggae friendly ‘Stormy Cloud’ do stagger occasionally in that direction).
The fact that ‘Jaku’ translates from the Japanese to the English as ‘tranquillity’ should pretty much explain how this record only manages enter the sushi bar only by virtue of the cocktail lounge side-entrance. Pianos tingle, basses plod and all manner of sickly, curio strings pervade. Easy-listening – but quality all the same – perhaps having more in common with the likes of Warp’s Savath & Savalas than with anything remotely urban; a Get Carter soundtrack for the Anime and Manga generation.
DJ Krush invited a rich variety of Japanese musicians to record live in the studio with him on this album and it’s a not un-pleasing texture; the traditional Japanese flute – the shakuhachi – the three-stringed Tsugaru-jamisen and traditional Japanese drums. Which makes tracks like the neon-spattered scratchy cyberspaces of tracks like ‘Decks-athron’ all the more terminal and disorienting.
There are a handful of junglist, MC vignettes: ‘Kill Switch’ with Aesop Rock, ‘Nosferatu’ with Mr Lif – but neither of them actually shine.
The problem is this: there’s only so much information the senses can tolerate in the background and Jaku is simply guilty of failing to address the interest of the foreground. It’s pleasant, but it’s not persuasive.