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Akira Umeda – Gueixa
Graphic design for Akira Umeda’s cassette tape with drawings by the artist himself.
São Paolo’s genius/crackshot Lugar Alto label never miss – they’ve already given us the only DJ Ramon Sucesso record in existence, as well as that amazing 1987 album of Serbian exotic-bird ambience by Mitar Subotić & Goran Vejvoda, plus a set of killer DIY works by São Paolo’s maverick Akira Umeda, who now mints the label’s first ever tape with a richly unpredictable tapestry of hallucinatory fragments and sensorial chicanery, landing somewhere between Dome, Voice Actor, Bryn Jones’ E.g Oblique Graph, Delia Derbyshire’s ‘Dreams’ and Anne Gillis.
Akira Umeda is a bona fide polymath; a historian by training, he later became a ceramicist, a photographer, a visual artist, a draftsman, a graphic designer, a DJ, a musician, an audio technician, a writer, a researcher – multiple forays into artistic and academic fields with a single intention: to achieve a specific objective and promptly exit, stage left. Restless, and easily bored, he’s understandably in possession of a huge archive of unreleased work which he here somehow assembles into one of the most satisfying sets of weirdo music we’ve heard in a while.
Picking up where last year’s eponymous ‘Akira Umeda (1988-2018)’, and its deeply eerie cover art, left off, ‘Gueixa’ assembles 202 of his own tracks into a spellbinding, poetically patchworked and queered mixtape of sorts, which the label compare to “a series of post-contemporary haikus”. It’s a low key masterclass in atmospheric and opaque worldbuilding that piques the senses with something approaching the nuance of Voice Actor’s dream logic or the spare, bare boned silhouettes of Bryn Jones’ Muslimgauze prototypes, resonating with the shadowier ends of storytelling excursions on another killer Brazilian label – Liga do Vento Divino.
Despite the sheer volume of material presented, it’s an immaculately unhurried affair that’s almost incidental in its ephemeral nature, feeling as though it just came into being, rather than conceived with any sort of intent. That’s not to discount the exquisitely fine stitching under the surface, but to marvel at its effortless strangeness, developing at a dreamlike pace that suspends disbelief and prompts the subconscious to the surreal with uncanny potency. Perhaps more acutely than his previous LP, the sounds here are arranged and projected with a visual quality that harks to his wide-ranging interests and artistic practice, playing out with a micro-dosed wooze that’s really quite hard to describe.
Fleeting traces of noirish synths and overheard conversation pull us into a quietly breathtaking series of transitions, both smudged, faded and jump-cut, between passages of frayed downbeat rhythms, narrative madness, burning but not overbearing noise, into lo-fi ambient pop, chamber blooz and minimal coldwave prayers wreathed with the clammy touch of Anne Gillis or some long-discarded tape of unmarked, undated Dome jams. In other words, exactly the sort of fantasy gear we live for.
Images and text by Boomkat
Category: Graphic Design
Location: São José dos Campos, BR
Client: Lugar Alto
Collaborators: Akira Umeda
Year: 2024