Gutevolk — Twinkle

After two poor electronic albums from Japan reviewed in a week, I was hoping for something better. This one is once more Japanese and electronic, it’s a little better but still not giving me much satisfaction.

Gutevolk is Hirono Nishiyama, who has released albums on Noble and Nobukazu Takemura’s Childisc. I heard her latest full-length and wasn’t exactly impressed, but since this new ep is released through happy, I thought I’d give a try.

Happy is a 12k sublabel, dedicated to “unconventional Japanese pop”. Their first release was an ep by Piana, which was nothing short of fantastic. The comparison doesn’t really favour Twinkle.

Nishiyama’s music is a sort of naïve, sweet, electronic pop music. It has also a childish aspect, having apparently been composed at the same period she was reading the stories of Mother Goose. The compositions are some very “nice”, happy and sad at the same time, up-tempo things, with some harp, piano and electronics. It reminds me of the music of Kazumasa Hashimoto, being a nature oriented work. The sound is almost pastoral, and you wouldn’t be surprised to hear a pig or a lamb.

The CD might be rather short (a little more than 20 minutes), it’s still a bit difficult to take all the sweet. It’s too nice, too corny, too childish, too much of stuff which should come, according to me of course, in small doses.