Noriko Baba — Bonbori

Noriko Baba is a Japanese modern classical composer whose work blends more nostalgic and traditional harmonies with pitch warping, jarringly sear, and general off-kilter-ness. Here from Austria’s Kairos music is a seven-piece/ten-track album, collecting together her work from the years 2008 and 2022.

As we’ve come to expect from a Kairos, the disc comes presented in the label's house style four-panel digipak, which features a glossy/ stuck in thirty-five-page inlay booklet, featuring English and German texts, as well as colour pictures of the composer/ players.

We open with 2011’s "Non-Canonic  Variations" for flute, clarinet, viola and cello. The eight-minute track starts with a gentle/ kind of cute/ warming melody, but fairly soon this becomes warped and light seared- before melting down to a dirge. As the piece progresses, we move into mixers of swooping/ sourly warbling strings, sudden loud neck swipes/ dense ‘n’ darting volume rises, and baying avant-jazz horn work.  It’s a great start to the release, which gets you ready for the playful, unpredictable ride the album is.

As we move on, we come to the bird whistles, dramatically darting string pomp, theatrical soprano singing, sudden darting ‘n’ plucking percussion, and prancing piano runs of 2019’s "Au pavillon de (Monsieur) Porcelaine… en six variation". There’s the mouth popping sounds, on/off grooving flow, grinding ‘n’ deep cello sawing’s, to pastoral harmonic florishes of 2020’s "Avant le Chant d’amour".

The disc is finished off with 2022’s three-track piece "Bestiarium Musicale" for flute, clarinet, guitar, viola, cello, piano, and percussion. This shifts between the playful and jaunting,  to searingly grating and dartingly warping, bounding, fiddling, manically cascading ‘n’ crashing.

As a release, Bonbori wonderful darts ‘n’ shift between the playful, harmonic, jarring, and uneasily seared. An album for those who enjoy surprise and creative sonic flair in their modern classical compositions.