Kazumasa Hashimoto, _Yupi_ (Plop)

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Some who compose and mix their music by electronic means delight in the complexity the new technology makes simple; others revel in simplicity itself, thereby humanizing that same technology. Kazumasa Hashimoto belongs to the latter category and with his debut release Yupi, immediately proves a master of the genre.

A pianist since childhood, he uses simple chords and runs to lend a warm foundation for the digital manipulations which are the album´s fourteen tracks, a hopping back and forth between short interludes and longer pieces. Alongside the piano, he also picks up the violin, cello, flute, guitar and drumsticks to create an astonishingly organic hybrid of the digital and the acoustic.

The general sensation is of having entered a brand new world, one entirely populated by the innocent pleasures of childhood. Lovely to listen to, heart-warming and reassuring, and yet in all its simplicity, as carefully conceived and mesmerizing as any of the more accomplished current work of Ekkehard Ehlers. Naïveté is also a rhythm.

Stephen Fruitman