Brain-Wash

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Like the concrète masters, the most interesting computer-based improvisers have found a way to make engaging music without such crutches as melody or song structure. At its best, such music can be as expressive as any traditional composition, its ultimate success or failure dependent upon the artist's resourceful scavenging, imaginative juxtapositions, and personal motivation. Otani's solo Brain-Wash draws you in with noises that come together in seemingly coincidental fashion, most so fleeting that identification is all but impossible. "The Flash Of Summer," the disc's title track, and the five centerpiece "Fragment"s roll forward like ever-growing tumbleweeds, gathering found and electro-acoustic sounds, fragments of guitar (played by Otani) and recorded instrumentation, and dalliances with informal rhythmic ideas. Otani's work is caught in such a strange nether-zone of composition that it's easiest to describe it by first establishing what it is not. Brain-Wash is not quite narrative, not especially impressionistic, and certainly not haphazard. It is modern surrealism, comfortably removed from the sour, cut-up irony of Stock, Hausen & Walkman or People Like Us and the Dada-damaged absurdity of Nurse With Wound. Otani achieves an even more rarefied wit than either school. The familiar and the improbable clash in passing, eliciting smiles as genuine as each moment's studied construction and just as evanescent. The lack of consequence is striking and only heightens the sense of unnaturalness that pervades Otani's dense, non-repetitive inventions. Tension is as non-existent here as harmony or congruity. The collision of sounds occurs virtually without incident, leaving no debris, even the faintest of engrammatic marks fading almost instantly. Though as fixed on disc as any recording, Brain-Wash literally wipes itself from your memory as it plays, so that each encounter with Otani's music feels as fresh as the first.