Sora is Kurosawa Takeshi, a musician from Kyoto, a city more renowned for its countless shrines than for its cutting-edge musicians.  A trained pianist, he started making music with digital samplers about ten years ago. Back then he was very influenced by the Warp scene. Now, his music has more to do with Taylor Deupree’s 12_k label than with the Sheffield stable. This is his first full-length and it is released by Plop, the label who brought us the excellent record of Kazumasa Hashimoto, which in a way comes quite close to re.sort, although Yupi (review here) gave a feel of burgeoning nature. This one, while sounding quite connected to nature, is a different affair.

In Japanese, Sora can have two meanings: So is the key G and Ra is A, but it also means sky. And after one listen, the link between the music and the word sky is quite obvious: re.sort is an album that feels good blue sky, sun, white sand beaches. Farniente, but doing it with style…

Japan’s links with Brazil and its music are well documented (in the 19th century, Brazil was one of the countries welcoming the most Japanese migrants). Thus, it should come as no surprise that this album makes me think of Ipanema; Rio de Janeiro. Indeed, Kurosawa uses a lot of bossa-nova and jazz records samples. These samples, all of them quite recognizable (not the source, but the genre, the melody) are digitally fused, mixed with glitches, microsounds. But re.sort is not just a digital mash of glitches and bossa-nova. A lot of other sounds are used: field-recordings, voices, glockenspiels and quite a few other instruments. All the elements are put together using the familiar cut-up technique.

Writing these words on the 29th of December, I can’t help but think that’s it’s about summer on the beach of Ipanema. It might not help me meeting the girl, but re.sort definetly makes my mind wander and go somewhere warmer. That in itself is a nice feat.