Album "The Anomalous Folk"

Notes On The Album ”The Anomalous Folk”

The FURICO Music Team - Music Works · The Anomalous Folk

Tracks

The Beginnings

Middle Of Insouciance

Equatorial Deliverance *

North At Defining Moments

Present: Neither Ancient, Past Nor Future (ft. ANSOUND)

Easterly Ocean Current

Westbound Propagations

Neither East, West, North, Nor South

Destinations

Here I Am

* The title of "Equatorial Deliverance" was rejected by Repost By SoundCloud, just because it contains the letters "live". Just ridiculous... The track is listed as "Equatorial D" for the released album.

Concept: "Bone Art"

(TI writes:)

I believe that musical scales and rhythms in music are like the bones and skeleton of a living creature.

In living organisms, blood and flesh basically only exist while they are alive. In some cases, however, the bones and skeleton remain for hundreds of millions of years.

The same applies to music: the 'performance form', 'performance method', 'tone' and 'instruments', which can be called the blood and flesh of music, are metabolised according to the times, technology and social background, but the scales and rhythms, which can be called the bones and skeleton of the music, remain the bones and skeleton of the music, and seem to be the basis for shaping it.

I want to take out only the bones and skeleton of the music and love it.

In this sense, the production process of this series may be a process of deconstructing music, extracting its bones and creating a musical skeletal specimen, or a creative work of 'Born Art' using the bones.

"Folk music of nowhere"

(TM writes:)

Have a look through the titles of the tracks, and you may find this album has a story like this: "I’m in neither direction and not in neither the past nor the future. I'm here at this moment and I'm at the beginning. I take a look at the east, west, north, south and middle and now I see the destination I should head to."

Folk music in general is related with the religion and we have religious analogies in it. The direction (to Mecca) is always important for Muslims and so is that to Jerusalem for Jews. The four directions imply the cross for Christians. The Anemoi has four Greek Gods of winds (ie, four directions), whereas the Indian myth has four Gods as guardians of the four directions, which were absorbed into Buddhists. Śākyamuni (later Buddha) allegedly walked in the four directions from his home and recognised people's sufferings.

As you might know, almost all music has their own system. The system comprises the tonality, scale, instruments, rhythm, etc. The rock music has its own system, so does jazz, so does ambient music, and so forth. Musicians often make music based upon a particular existing system, frequently subconsciously. 

Well, that occurs “too often” to me, especially for those who create music after the systems were radically destroyed in the early 20th century. I can describe it by analogy with fine arts, in which the cubism and abstractionism emerged in the world of the perspectives and compositions. Or, relativity and quantum mechanics innovated the classical physics. Or, Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, etc focused on the human mental processes, which the natural science had not.

I could be anomalous. Not only me, but also TI should be. Not only us, but also there might be some others, especially frequent listeners to FMT. Here I call those “The Anomalous Folk.”

The album “The Anomalous Folk” is designed under the concept of “folk music of nowhere”, which is very similar to what TI calls the "Bone Art." As I wrote earlier, folk music has more or less religious meanings or purposes. Yet as above, in the early 20th century Arnold Schönberg, John Cage and so on eradicated, so to say, the so-called Western music. Or, even before the modernity, we could say the Romantic music and arts weakened the relationship with the religion. Just like them what if folk music deconstructed itself? What if folk musicians were shocked and greatly inspired by taking listens to contemporary music and electronic music, etc, and deconstructed their music back home? 

But what is home, then? Whereas there are traditional folk music styles for some, of course, which are very nice, many others have only feeble regional musical contexts. We may be two of the most typical musicians that symbolise that. Even though I love Japanese folk music, possibly much more than general Japanese people should do, I do not have the Japanese music systems in the subconscious level at all. (Sadly to some extent, there are a lot of historical disjunctions in the country.)

Rather, our home should be somewhere around SoundCloud, in other words, the anomalous folk. I sometimes feel it must be like modern Paris Salon where progressive artists got together. The system is nothing but our own, ie, folk music of nowhere.