Hatohan

text

Mysticism and music meet in Hatohan's impressive work, the sheer poetic vision of which embarrasses even the exquisiteness of Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba, Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan and Akira Kurosawa's Dreams. Hatohan frames his album, his first release since gracing Ash's Chiky[u]u project with the stunning "El Dorado," as a seventy-minute tale of the supernatural intruding upon the everyday. A hilltop encounter with demonic forces spirits him away on a metaphysical journey, narrated not with words but with sound, through a sinister daydream whirl of elemental entities and nonlinear states of altered spiritual consciousness which may be flights of Looking-Glass fancy or actual superimposed realities. Wind-like voices, metallic reverberations, gong chimes, keening feedback, ritual flute music and natural and electro-acoustic noises splash against a canvas of profound silence, daubing its surface with streaks of sound in both the softest watercolor shades and in the most brilliant leaded enamels. Zephyrs howl, hungry monsters growl, unseen forces whisper and Hatohan's beautiful sound-poetry unscrolls like a summit of Akifumi Nakajima at his most stirringly meditative, Hafler Trio or Nurse With Wound in their rare but always fascinating imagistic mode and the transcendental peak moments of rippling Riley-esque drone which David Jackman and Organum have perfected. A narrative explanation, in the form of a diary of Hatohan's dreamer's dreams, can be found among the lovely art-inserts included in the elegant handcrafted box (allegedly assembled by monks in a nearby village!) But Hatohan's mastery of a unique unwritten and unspoken gestural musical language certainly outshines any imagery offered by the printed word. To drink deepest from this record's wellsprings of impressionistic wonder, you would ideally devise your own tongue and translate Hatohan's sumptuous storm of sound into mind-screen choreography of sun-splintered dust motes and howling phantasms. With its potpourri of symbols (eggs, seeds, water, trees, a "temple of earth"), fantastic manifestations (winged women, evil spirits, demons) and non-sequiturs rooted in the commonplace (salesmen offering tea, children playing), Hatohan's story is kin to Alejandro Jodorowsky's metaphysical western, El Topo and its even further-"out" semisequel, The Holy Mountain. Though Hatohan's journey takes less a form of a heavy-handed exegesis than it does a mythical folk tale spun by a wizened storyteller who has entreated you to "close your eyes and listen." Hatohan's acousmatic wizardry will fill your head with extraordinary visions, if you're willing to do just that.