- The Japanese techno maestro explores Krautrock and '90s electronica on an incredible debut album.
- Wata Igarashi has had a number of passions over his lifetime—baseball, punk, jazz, political science. His muses have transformed and evolved as he moves from one interest to the next. But most of the world knows him for his powerful techno. In just a couple years in the mid-'10s, Igarashi established a seductive sound that combined the tunneling atmosphere of Rome-school techno (think Donato Dozzy) with the psychedelic flair of fellow Japanese artists like DJ Nobu. His productions were, essentially, perfect, balancing melody, rhythm and texture with a level of confidence and finesse that made his tracks stand out even in the most zoned-out and seamless of techno sets. But that's not all he can do.
While it would be difficult to call anything the beloved Japanese producer makes underrated, his ambient productions deserve a second look. Since releasing these compositions in earnest in 2020, he's shown a new side to his work, and proven that his mastery of electronic music isn't limited to techno. Enter Agartha, which comes not through a heady techno label but via Kompakt, home to trance, microhouse and crossover pop music. The album is not quite techno, and it's definitely not ambient—instead, it's some secret third thing: a brilliant statement of artistic purpose from an artist whose genius goes far beyond the genre that made him famous. It comes with a vague concept, named for a mythical kingdom under the surface of the earth (which has also provided inspiration for Miles Davis), underlining a a gentle sense of exploration and exoticism on an album that largely jettisons techno and showcases a kind of compositional genius instead.
Agartha introduces some of the Berlin school to Igarashi's sound, with a touch of prog rock. Tangerine Dream, Pink Floyd, Popol Vuh and Wolfgang Dauner are some of the most obvious names that come to mind when listening to the album. After the requisite ambient intro, "Searching" brings the broken techno, but it's slower and unusually cinematic—the strings in the background lend it a certain kind of breathless propulsion into something unknown, like the climactic stargate scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey. From there, things become unmoored. Igarashi introduces heavy organ squalls ("Subterranean Life") and ritualistic chanting ("Ceremony Of The Dead"), elements more befitting of a '90s act like The Irresistible Force than anything on Midgar, the label that released much of Igarashi's defining work.
The "eureka" moment of this new(ish) sound comes on "Ceremony Of The Dead" when a bloom of synth lights up the soundscape, like a flashlight casting over previously unexplored terrain, with the same sense of awe and wonder. That mixes with whimsy on tracks like "Burning," where a percolating bassline becomes the foundation for some fantastic synth noodling that calls back to Igarashi's love of jazz fusion, especially the kind focused more on the fusion than the jazz. It's all very '70s, with shimmers of Dark Side Of The Moon.
Beyond jazzy improvisation and extended jamming, it's the precision and economy of Igarashi's arrangements that makes Agartha work. The slow, methodical arpeggio—a Wata trademark—unfurls beautifully on the closing "Eternal," which could have been a simply brooding fade-out on a lesser producer's record. Instead, the song feels intentional and methodical, its sounds sculpted from both acoustic and electronic sound. Even his vignettes are fascinating—the growling tones on "Darkness" put an uneasy spin on the usual techno album interlude.
Igarashi's success as a producer boils down to a larger talent, which is his ability to master whatever he sets his mind on, more than any particular allegiance to a genre or sound. From winding arpeggios to choral voices and Mellotron-like tones, Agartha miraculously connects disparate but clearly related traditions. It's almost like listening to his musical interests speak to one another, in a moment where he truly lets go of techno's gridded approach and lets his freak flag fly into the newly open space.
Tracklist01. Abyss I
02. Searching
03. Subterranean Life
04. Ceremony of the Dead
05. Floating Against Time
06. Abyss II
07. Burning
08. Agartha
09. Darkness
10. Eternally