Written 2000/01/12
Some comrades and I were wandering aimlessly through a record store to kill time, when something caught my eye in the "Easy Listening" section. It was a Kodo album I had never seen before. I could tell the cover art used the same photo as Ibuki, but it had been processed through some sort of Photoshop- type filter, giving it a peculiar glowing, liquidy quality. I took this as an indicator that the disc was a collection of "hip 'n' cool" reworkings of material from Kodo's great album Ibuki. When I saw the words "mix" and "DJ" on the back, my suspicions were more or less confirmed. I shuddered to think what kind of gross travesty these tracks might have made of one of my favourite musical groups. I'd bet that when certain DJ's are asked to do such remixes, they hear it as a command to "cheezify". And yet in spite of the potential horrors, I was intensely curious...
So my curiousity got the better of me. I bought Sai-so. I listened to it. I prepared for the worst. After a few listens, however, I found myself more receptive to some of these new-fangled remixes. Some of them.
"Strobe's Nanafushi" starts off the disc, with more Kodo source material than I might have expected. Though I might wish there were a few less orch hits and conventional synth snare fills, I found it quite listenable indeed. The disc's closing track, "Strobe's Satori Beats" would easily be superior to the first if the vocal elements were present. Still, the reprise of the Nanafushi themes is a nice way to end it. Bill Laswell, who produced "Ibuki", seems to have the most reverence of anyone on "Sai-so" for Kodo's original pieces, and his additions and manipulations are unintrusive and tasteful. A track entitled "Wax-Off" (I hope that's not a Mr. Miyagi reference, so help me!) hits a fair middle ground with ample servings of old and new patterns, weaving them together in an adequate fashion.
But there were some tracks on "Sai-so" that came close to fitting my image of the "cheezification" process. Kevin Yost's "Deep & Ethnic Mix" probably has the least Kodo material of all, with only the ching-ching and momentary clash of cymbals being recognizable from "Jang-Gwara". It seems little more than an excuse to include what otherwise sounds like a piece from a jazzy porno soundtrack (at least that's what my experiences watching Blue Nuit and scrambled "smut channels" would indicate). There's too much skanky guitar and distortion on "Wax-On" for my liking. After a snippet of the glorious shinobue duet in "Akabanah" and some raucous shouting by the Sado Island troupe, the stiff, inhibited synthetics of "Intelligente's Nobi" sound pretty lame to my ears, even if they might be rave-worthy. There's a lot of samples from the original later on, but the old and the new don't get along here. And DJ Krush couldn't resist putting some hackneyed house beats up front on his "Ibuki Reconstruction", leaving the more interesting taiko rhythms as mere accompaniment. To paraphrase Mark Twain: "If you were to cross a DJ with Kodo, it would improve the DJ, but it would deteriorate Kodo."
Bear in mind this review is from the standpoint of a Kodo fan, and I doubt that I understand dance music any better than any senior citizen. It might not have been worth the money for me, but if you have an ear for all things dance, this might be an oppotunity to introduce youself to the Japanese way of the drum, as reborn on "Sai-so". I'll stick with "Ibuki" myself.
