Bedroom In The Cage

Add Tokyo's Hidenobu Ito to the growing list of Rising Sun radicals primed to turn electronica on its head. He approaches the arena of digital sample-salad acrobatics, where such fine producers as Yoshihiro Hanno and Nobukazu Takemura hold court, from a multi-instrumental, thrash rock, and punk-band background. Ito is young, energetic, brimming with ideas, and just nanve enough to try anything at least once.
BEDROOM IN THE CAGE is an auspicious debut. Piano parts, samples, bolts of electric guitar, and beats alike are splintered and tossed into the mix, stirred vigorously, and left glinting like drowned stars in the vast, echoing unknown. Ito fishes this reservoir of randomness for reason--what he might call "Heterogeneous Rationality". What he reels in ("Memory of Sound", "A Whim", "Foresight", "Dogra Magra", "The Third Ear", the blisteringly prog-adelic "Universe Within" and "Ambivalent Black Note") are compositional aberrations of alien-music semblance. Ito's freakish, ADD-addled breakbeats and over-stimulated sonics initially register as musical tantrums thrown within a padded room--or within the confines of the titular bedroom cage. But he matches fits of nervous energy with such inspired bursts of melody and invention that one quickly comes to suspect the knowing machinations of mad genius.|