Ryley walker kikagaku moyo bandcamp2/21/2023 With that Genesis line in mind, suddenly Course in Fable’s adventurous chord changes, winding song structures, splashes of inspired intricate instrumental runs and fills earn an approving ‘ahh, I see what you’re doing here’ quality. It’s a genre with a definitional expiration.Ĭourse in Fable presents a vision of how progressive rock can contribute to music past its initial decades. Copy that sound and you betray the progressive ethos, stray too far and no one recognizes it as progressive rock anyway. For a genre that loudly defined itself as a new era for music, it ended up being closely associated with the specific sounds of its early progenitors. But yet, ask any group of music lovers for their favorite albums and you’ll see the same 70s prog classics reappear. Why are there so many prog fans, but so few new breakout prog albums? Emulate the sound too closely and you’re ‘nu-prog’, a niche among niches, hidden to the undevoted. But still, the Genesis plug kept feeling more relevant as I listened. Course in Fable is not a progressive rock album. Second: this is obviously Walker being cheeky and wasn’t something I originally wanted to put too much weight on. I’m never touring again unless it’s opening for Genesis.” Ah ha!įirst off: hell yeah. This leaves one more important influence, given away by Ryley Walker’s provided artist biography: “I live in NYC. While there’s a seemingly straight trajectory between these two albums, the growth between them is best informed by the two instrumental albums he snuck in the three-year interim: Little Common Twist with jazz drummer Charles Rumback, which is an impressive tour of every texture and mood you can squeeze out of majority acoustic guitar and drums and Deep Fried Grandeur made from krautrock-flavored live jamming with Japanese psych-rock band Kikagaku Moyo (released only two months ago). His newest album, Course in Fable, showcases both, expanding on a sound familiar to anyone who heard his 2018 release Deafman Glance. Are they one and the same? Has the band finally made it back home? It’s up to the listener to decide.Ryley Walker has deftly weaved together dual reputations as a singer/songwriter and prolifically-collaborating guitarist. In fact, it may be possible to draw a parallel between the topography of the band’s home country-an island nation, surrounded by bodies of water-and the mysterious isle of Kumoyo. Strangely enough, the words seem to conjure an image of the protagonist floating among the clouds, looking down upon Tokyo Bay. For “Meu Mar”, an Erasmos Carlos cover, the original Portuguese lyrics were translated into English, then to Japanese. “Monaka”, its name taken from a type of Japanese wafer sweets, takes melodic inspiration from traditional minyofolk styles, while “Yayoi Iyayoi” is a rare instance of the band singing in their native tongue, its evocative lyrics utilizing archaic words taken from old poetry and nature books found in one of the many second-hand bookstores of Tokyo. In the 1.5 months spent in Tokyo, everything started to come together. With unrestricted time in the studio, they began to build upon the demos and song fragments they’d amassed since their last tour. With their adopted homebase of Amsterdam under lockdown and their touring activities halted due to the pandemic, the band felt a renewed sense of freedom being back in shitamachi, or the old downtown area of their hometown. Reconvening at Tsubame Studios in Asakusabashi, Tokyo, where their earliest material had been recorded, the five members of Kikagaku Moyo found new inspiration in a familiar and comfortable environment. In that sense, the title and cover art for the band’s fifth and final album draws you into a magical mass of land surrounded by water-but the couch suggests that ‘Kumoyo Island’may not be a fleeting stop, but rather a place of respite, where one could pause and take it all in. While their decade-long career can be summarized as a series of kaleidoscopic explorations through lands and dimensions far and near, there’s a strong intention in each of their works to take the listener to a particular place, however real or abstract they may be. In many ways ‘Kumoyo Island’ represents the culmination of a journey for Kikagaku Moyo. “The fifth studio album & last euphoric mind-trip to Kikagaku Moyo's imagined island.īest-suited for counting stars, looking at the ocean, and dancing in one’s daydream.”
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