The first touches of spring from Aspidistrafly
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Label: Kitchen
Year: 2009
Format: CD
Oh my, what a lovely little jewel of a release this is, marking the inauguration of the new Kitchen label based in Singapore. Aspidistrafly is the collaboration between April Lee and label-owner Ricks Ang, that sees the two combining their talents with summery vocals, light guitar melodies, music boxes, percussive elements and various harmonies and melodies.
The album comes in delicate packaging, an artbook of sorts with lush, colourful photographs by April Lee and Rika M in a fold-out poster format. Pleasing then, that the music is just as warming and graces your hair and skin like a gentle, spring breeze. April Lee’s youthful vocals sit neatly atop the gentle, atmospheric melodies weaved by the two, and her voice is very reminiscent of Kirsty Hawkshaw of Opus III fame – both adlibbing and humming a breathy chorus with angelic undertones to the sung vocals with light as air verses nestled in the comfort of Lee’s acoustic guitar and electronics accompaniment. With them, is also Haruka Nakamura contributing with guitar and piano backing on the dreamy “Endless Dreamless”. Throughout the album, light, airy electronic textures and warm washes of synth-based soundscapes and strummed guitar melodies join with gentle vocals by Lee, often set to the field recordings of children’s voices and nature. This gives rise to some immediate associations to Sawako, and during the course of listening to this album, it feels like a soundtrack of sorts to the wonderful literary universe of Murakami in a sense – both present and down-to-earth, unassuming and kind, yet also retaining some mysterious, delicate qualities to distinguish Aspidistrafly’s music from their peers.
The album concludes with 花火 (ed. goodbye?), which is a joy of shimmering sounds and very colourful, lots of tingling bells and actually reminiscent of Soundscaping’s own Air Resort release in certain places, an uplifting and optimistic way to end a great first album and expectations of a promising future for the Kitchen label.
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