amusingmusings is a new feature from Counterzine’s newest contributor, Secat, that riffs and digresses on recent, exciting releases in music, games, television, movies, and more. Today’s amusingmusings covers the album ‘Imni’ by Yakui.
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Imni is interesting. Imni is one of the most interesting projects i’ve heard in a long while. i’m not sure if i can remember the last time i was so transfixed by what an album has had to say to me.
OKok hear me out. i’m flustered.
i’ve been sitting with This Damn Record (said record being Imni by Yakui) for about a month now and i’m still not sure if i’m completely ready to talk about it.
to sum it up, i think it’s one of the very best of the year – but in a way that i find incredibly complicated to transcribe. it intimidates me. Imni is a thing of great beauty; it’s difficult to touch. my ear-hands brush against the hot Imni-stove: yowch!
it’s like a great cosmic journey through a universe that expands and contracts as would a beating heart. a lifeblood of stuttering, looping fragments running through everything. i think of Imni sort how i think of stained glass. i’m not going to explain that.
a point of reference i kept coming back to as i listened (and relistened, and relistened, and relistened) to this record was Fennesz’s “Endless Summer.” i think the two projects share some similar strands of inspirational DNA.
see this is where that dumb “talking about music is like dancing about architecture” quote comes to smirk at me from the corner of the room, because i find Imni so hard to discuss. sometimes the very best shit you find is also the most annoying, because it defies easy categorization; because it alters your internal framework. Imni has taken charge of some area of my brain; i hear differently now.
and there are only so many ways i am able to tell you “hey this is really good!!” before i start wanting to punch myself in the face.
the moment this album really caught me the first time i was listening to it was at this wonderful transition point at the 5th track, “Radial Hardcore.” prior to this, the album is a shivering thing covered in rippling sheets of gauze (“Esky,” “Meltwave”); at “Radial Hardcore,” the sheets are ripped off; the groaning, grinding machine underneath is clearly visible. the project takes on a sharper quality. Yakui throws a glass of ice water at you.
and “Radial Hardcore” goes right into “Beltgate” which is this horrible grimey scream that makes me want to sell my car and go live in the woods outside my apartment complex –
“Interface” is the very best track, though, and it deserves to be beamed into every American home via high powered satellite array. it’s that good. if you listen to “Interface” and you don’t like it i’ll beat you up.
(that’s a gag, don’t worry, you’re allowed to like or dislike whatever you want, it’s ok, just know that you will put me in a beating-up mood if you tell me you don’t like “Interface” from Imni by Yakui)
after “Interface” displays the internal organs of the work, you are slowly brought back out through the other side of its body, through to the charming, autechre-y (circa LP5) fuzzbump epidermis of “Fairy Glen”;
finally, upon reaching “Earthworm”‘s twee halting vocal stutters, you are allowed to be an observer and not an inhabitant of the thing again; the thing that is Imni by yakui. and what an interesting form this thing has –
quite interesting, indeed!
look. i know i am probably overselling this to you. i can’t help it. i am overpassionate at the best of times. but i really do think this is one of the most sublime releases of the year.
ultimately what you get out of this record will be what you are willing to put in – you do need some degree of tolerance for a kind of looping aimlessness that permeates the work. i kind of interpret that as the sonic equivalent of anxiety. if you are not an anxious person perhaps this will feel very uncomfortable or irritating to listen to. i get it!
but whatever! if you don’t like this you’re WRONG
music is AWESOME
secat OUTTTTTT
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Secat is a musician and writer based in Houston, Texas. To see more of their work, you can follow them on Twitter (@secatsecat) or check out their personal blog at secatsecat.home.blog.
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