Monolith Cocktail Blog

Premiere
Words: Dominic Valvona

A Journey Of Giraffes ‘Kona’
(Somewherecold Records) 23^rd August 2019

John Lane has travelled a long way, in musical terms, from his burgeoning lo fi days recreating a Casio keyboard vision of Brian Wilson’s beachcomber dreamy beatifications, under the seashell symphony ego of Expo, to the more transcendental meditative beginnings of his present alter ego, A Journey Of Giraffes. The safari has moved, in more recent years, away from the Beach Boys to more ambient and traversing experimental influences. The last album from the unassuming Baltimore composer that we featured, a couple of years back, went all out on an aimless supernatural field-recorded walk through the forest. F² is an eerie and strange affair; a mixture of Arthur Russell meets Panda Bear and Alejandro Jodorowsky in the backyard of Maryland.

Taking another road-less-travail kind of amble through another sort of imaginative woods setting, Lane’s latest, and quite possibly his most complete, album Kona, which we are lucky and indeed honored to be premiering today, is inspired by a Japanese art, music and contemplation. A love letter in many ways to the late Japanese electronic composer Susumu Yokota, this sweeping, often subtly matriculate and ambient affair, suite pays a homage not only to his more washed and ruminative musical peregrinations but his quotes as well. The album title is itself taken from one such lyrical pronouncement/augur: “Bones of the dead are shattered like kona and sprinkled over the homeland. Children can fly in the sky when sprinkled with Angel’s kona.”

Known for bridging techno, house and more minimalistic, and almost the neo-classical, fields of electronic music to forge a thoroughly modern Japanese sound, it is Yokota’s brushed calligraphy and mysterious evocations that are used like footnotes to Lane’s interpretive exploration: Less the Jeff Mills and Rob Hood acid burbles and intelligent techno of Acid Mt. Fuji, and more the gliding, thoughtful intricacies and panoramas of Sakura.

A clue as to what you might expect to hear from Lane’s Japonism, the quilted bird-in-motion artwork (Swallow and Camellia by Itō Jakuchū) is a suitable guide to this deep immersive experience; one that is influenced as much but the literary finesse of Natsume Soseki‘s The Three Cornered World novella as it is by Studio Ghibli’s seminal animated movie, Spirited Away. Kona is full of glistening water pool grottos and firefly lit paper lantern trails; a night garden both mysterious and imbued with peaceable Taoist understatement. You can certainly expect to hear dulcet thumb-plucked strings cascade against reverberated singular piano notes and pestle-and-mortar like scrapings, or, an insect chorus and water droplets falling on a millennia-aged and stoic moistened rock whilst hovering low synthetic drones pulse and throb. Beats are kept to a minimal, but they are there in the sophisticated mix of the fairytale and plaintive.

Magically ruminating, offering both the beatific and uncertain, Kona is an exotic, sometimes ceremonial, Zen like soundtrack that evokes the Fourth World Possible Musics of Jon Hassell, Popol Vuh and the higher plain communal glistened zither transcendence of Laraaji. As I’ve already said, this could be Lane’s most realized, complete album yet. And you can now wander that path yourself, as we premiere the album today, here: