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It's been a long time since I did an instalment in my micro album reviews series. This post *isn't* one, but maybe it'll get the ball rolling.
In 1995, Hawaiian musician Israel Kamakawiwoʻole recorded a song called "Tengoku Kara Kaminari", (meaning "Thunder from Heaven"), celebrating three American sumo wrestlers of Pacific Island heritage who were the first non-Japanese wrestlers in history to earn championship titles. If you know absolutely nothing about Hawaiian music (raises hand) but have some vague stereotypical notion of what "Hawaiian island music" might sound like, yeah, it sounds more or less exactly like that. I don't mean that as a slight, it's a genuinely nice song for what it is, it's sincere and sentimental and respectful and pays tribute to people and events that mean a lot to some people but are supremely obscure in the wider sphere.
A year later in 1996, Japanese jungle musician Soichi Terada (who would later go on to do the soundtrack for the series of "Ape Escape" games for the Playstation and successors) released an entire 11 track, 55 minute album inspired by this single song, called "Sumo Jungle Grandeur".
At some point in 2023, as best as I can remember, maaaybe late 2022 at absolute longest ago, I stumbled upon this album and was absolutely entranced by it. This is far outside my usual musical remit, I literally could not name a single other jungle artist, and I could not tell you how jungle differs from drum and bass, about which I am similarly clueless. As a general rule of thumb (not without exceptions) my interest in and appreciation for electronic music decreases the further you move away from early, experimental, analogue pioneering stuff and the closer you get to anything associated with the dance-and-drug-party scene. But Sumo Jungle Grandeur is one of the strongest exceptions to this. It slaps, or bangs, or whatever it is music is supposed to do these days, hard. It's tremendously unusual, surprisingly varied, it has recurring elements but also wanders all over the place, changing tempo and mood without feeling disordered. A YouTube comment (remember when those were universally acknowledged to be hands down the most incoherent and poorly written textual content on the entire internet, no exceptions? When and how did that change?) declares it to have "total coherence in all of its experimental playfulness", and this is exactly right. It samples heavily from the original Tengoku Kara Kaminari song, combining gentle ukulele with electronic drum beats, looping little snippets of lyric, taken out of context, over and over again (I had the two words "national heroes" stuck in my head for days after my first listen), but also mixes in what I can only assume are recordings of TV and/or radio commentaries of sumo matches by the three named wrestlers, plus a rendition of Sukiyaki for good measure. Honestly, if your interest is even slightly piqued by this description, just give it a listen, I doubt you'll regret it.
Three days ago, I was very surprised to see an entirely mainstream news outlet announce that none other than Akebono Taro, the first wrestler mentioned in the song, had died at the age of 54. I immediately put the album on, and resolved to finally get around to writing this post, which I'm doing now while listening to it again.
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