Hyper-Rhythmic Road Trips with Foodman

Between spills of toy instruments and spills of wooden percussion, flute melodies sing of small pleasures tumbling like little gifts. Synthesisers breathe through like puffs of fresh air, reminding us of the feeling of getting out of a car at a service station in the mountains, after a long drive.

Yasuragi Land is Foodman’s latest album—released by British dance music label Hyperdub on 9th July 2021—themed, as always for the artist, on the simple pleasures of Japanese daily life. Meaning ‘Tranquility Island’, it is inspired by the familiar delights of visiting local hot springs or michi no eki (Japanese motorway service stations that sometimes offer delicious food), and rediscovering them with an innocent wonder. While his complicated production touches on the ecstasies of footwork, deconstructed jazz, and minimal electronica, rhythms wonderfully create more from less, reminding us to look towards familiar places in real life. Like a road trip to your home town, Yasuragi Land is an honest place of peace and a moment of rediscovery in what was there all along.

A Food Festival

Under the pseudonym ‘Shokuhin Matsuri a.k.a Foodman’, Takahide Higuchi from Nagoya first emerged in the Japanese footworks scene in the early 2010s. When the accelerated tempos and irregular twists of Chicago’s dance music culture arrived to Japanese audiences, what Foodman heard was an unprecedented amount of freedom in a single genre. Inspiring him to deconstruct its potentials – alongside a multitude of other styles, from noise to ambient, techno to trap – now based in Yokohama, his style cherishes the raptures of all high-velocity genres with an unusually soft playfulness that can sing about ‘Parking Lots’ or ‘Gallery Cafes.’

Yasuragi Land from 2021 starts with ‘Omiyage’ (meaning souvenir), and ‘Yasuragi’ (meaning relaxation), where xylophones and other toy-like instruments dance around in polyrhythms next to guitar- or clarinet-like tonalities. The bouncing ‘Ari Ari’ breathes a gentle wonder into deep-house, singing about ants in tiny psychedelic bursts.

The song ‘Michi No Eki’, made with Taigen Kawabe from experimental psych-rock band Bo Ningen celebrates the roadside rest areas across Japan—an important motif of nostalgia and inner peace shared by many Japanese. Layered vocal tracks and soft guitar plucks are refined into a digitalised psych-rock, but whisper in the playful ingenuity of Japan’s art-pop underground.

Yasuragi Land (2021), an album by Foodman, is released on Hyperdub.