CD REVIEW: "Infinite Flowers" :
THE WIRE issue244 Jun, 2004

Amorfon is the new label run by Tokyo musician and artist Yoshio Machida. He has travelled extensively, making field recordings in Vietnam, seeking inspiration in Macedonia and performing in er. Lewisham. In short, Machida has gone out and networked. An encounter with Germany's Tomlab label proved a turning point, seeing the release of his second album, Hypernatural #2 (following his self-released debut), though perhaps more significantly he saw Tomlab as a model for releasing music beyond categories, including his own.
Amorfon's first release is by young Russian artist and DJ Fitz Ellarald, whom Machida met last year in Moscow. It's a peculiar album, made on "a pile of rubbish - old Soviet synthesizers, broken mics and a massive wooden guitar", together with the 21st century's rather more ubiquitous samples and computer (though the latter apparently counldn't cope with playing and recording at the same time). The result is a strangely Ambinet mix of sounds seemingly culled, as the title suggests, from the air, and sounds like a snippet of music heard from a room across a countryard. It's stuff that's just out there, which Ellarald simply tunes his cranky receivers into and shapes into something vaguely coherent. Surprisingly, it sounds pristine and utterly contemporary. The apposite cover is a badly taken snap of a family outing on a boat.
Machida's third album is equally 'adrift'. He doesn't really fit in anywhere - not the Tokyo Improv crowd, Off-site or otherwise, nor the laptopia of Ryoji Ikeda or Nobukazu Takemura, nor the noise of Keiji Haino of Merzbow. A pointer might be cassette memoryman Aki Onda, who also had an album on Tomlab, produced Machida's for that label and shares his wanderlust. But whereas Onda is currently preoccupied with portable cassette players, Machida's concerns are largely digital - even if Infinite Flowers is actually an album of steel drum music. That doesn't make him a virtual Jamaica All Stars Steel Band. Machida uses the instrument for its soft yet resonant timbres and processes them through his laptop. The almost swinging "Hana Mambo", not a huge amount going on. Floral but not florid.
by David Elliott