Nobukazu Takemura: Sign

Much like the practice of leaking information in Washington, the coining of new genre names involves sending up trial balloons and waiting to see what floats versus what gets shot out of the sky. The latest term on the electronic-music table is idyllictronica, a linguistic mash-up making the rounds on Internet chat boards with an implied dare to use it with a straight face. While such obsessive taxonomy may come across as exclusionary and absurd, it usually becomes an issue only when a handful of albums resist classification, while also signaling a worthwhile new direction in electronic music's real-time evolution. Like the glitchy dub of Vladislav Delay and the bit-mapped Beach Boys dreams of Fennesz, whose Endless Summer showed up on a number of recent year-end Top 10 lists, new albums by Nobukazu Takemura and Jim O'Rourke trade on the currency that idyllictronica connotes: a rootless, organic form of computer music at peace with the naturalistic musical values of warmth and emotion. Takemura, whose ties to the Thrill Jockey label and sound-design work on Sony's robotic dog Aibo have made him a relative star of electronic minimalism, bypasses the wiry, anxious suggestiveness of his medium in favor of thought-clearing contemplation on Sign. Opening with two tracks whose toy-like beats get abstracted like words repeated until all meaning is lost, the album mostly orbits around "Souvenir In Chicago," a 35-minute epic recorded with three members of Tortoise. After 10 minutes of by-the-numbers post-rock, the song begins to decompose, as Takemura stretches its nuances into wide expanses while reducing its in-between moments to fractured micro-clicks. Takemura's method often sounds like fast-forwarding through a CD, but the last third of "Souvenir" becomes an intricate study of overtones, with its time-crunched glitches exposed as the incidental byproduct of self-contained melodies unearthed in modulation, like monastery bells fading toward meditation. Sign's vaguely rockist experiments sound similar to Jim O'Rourke's old band Gastr Del Sol, which forged a seamless relationship between rock and electronic composition on its last two albums. A typically unlikely companion to O'Rourke's recent Insignificance, on which poisonous sentiment hid beneath a veil of innocuous '70s rock songs, I'm Happy, And I'm Singing, And A 1, 2, 3, 4 features the composerly guise that the experimental polymath has toyed with since he was 16. "I'm Happy" is a Steve-Reich-like phase piece, with sine waves oscillating through shared territory before detouring into an ambient electronic bog. "And I'm Singing" runs constantly shifting melodic figures through musique-concrète shards of noise. The album's jaw-dropping jewel is "And A 1, 2, 3, 4," a 21-minute meditation for string samples. Haunting and relentlessly beautiful, the song reveals its editor's hand only through subtle gradations in volume and an underlying metallic resonance. Like Takemura and a growing number of computer composers, O'Rourke takes a reactionary turn away from the laptop's limitless potential and redoubles his efforts to update the gentle hum of the idyll, finding natural inclinations in a method largely untouched by the human heart.