Nowhere

Chronique

After three albums in two years with his psych quintet the Silence, ex-Ghost musical guru Masaki Batoh returns to his solo roots for Nowhere, an album on which he wrote all songs and played all instruments. He began the project by trying to express a spiritual reality about the pervasiveness of impermanence and booked time at Tokyo's analogue GOK Sound. His initial approach was a singer/songwriter album, but this transcends those limits. He cut direct-to-tape acoustic guitar and vocal performances of each of these eight songs with two mics. If he deemed it necessary, more instruments and effects were added later to flesh out a particular tune; he was able to overdub without losing the immediacy of the original take. Batoh accompanied himself on vintage acoustic 6-and-12 string guitars and a 5-string banjo. Each track was played in the "drop D" tuning he learned from Martin Carthy while traveling through London in 1972. Depending on the tune, Batoh adds eerie harmony vocals, spooky reverb, organic percussion, mellotron, basses, electric guitars and harp.
Nowhere is Batoh's most haunted album. He sings in Japanese, English, and on "Dum Spiro Spero," Latin. The opening title track is sung in English. Its lyrics reflect the cycle of birth, death and rebirth as evolutionary -- we arrive from nowhere and return there. The gentleness in his multi-tracked harmony vocals underscore the undulating fingerpicked strings on his Guild acoustic. During the refrain, a wah wah'ed electric guitar reinforces his words. In "Tower of Silence," he commences with ringing single strings before moving into a minor key modal illustration of English folk music. The lyric follows in a dreamy, hypnotic, tumble as English and Japanese entwine in the verse. His picking patterns emphasise the middle strings, and flow outward to embrace tinges of reverb that frame the mix then rachets up in intensity before closing. His references to Tibetan sky burial (where the dead are chopped into pieces and left on charnel mounds for carrion) again underscores the temporality of the flesh and the freedom of the spirit. "Devil Got Me," is a wonky, psychedelic, slide-guitar blues in Japanese; the Skip James and Robert Johnson feel here is unmistakable. It's followed by the pillowy psychedelia of "Gaucho No Sora" that flows directly into the banjoed weirdness of "Dum Spiro Spero," (translating as "While I breathe, I hope"), a Batoh motto. The final two jams include the jangly trippiness of "Sundown" complete with snare, bass and interwoven electric and acoustic guitars that wraps the listener in a cocoon for seven minutes. The sprawling, meditative guitar instrumental "Bio Taull" drifts on for nearly 16 minutes, carrying the listener ever deeper into Batoh's original guitar-playing soundworld as if it were an implement of magic; it sounds unfettered by time and space. Nowhere is Batoh's most provocative yet accessible solo album; its otherworldly strangeness is uncompromising, but somehow welcoming because of its deep focus. Its many textured ripples, fissures and psychic pathways resonate long after its playing timer expires.

© Thom Jurek /TiVo