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dustedmagazine · 7 months

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Dust Volume Nine, Number Nine

Body/Head

The days are getting shorter, so why not a few more short reviews from Dusted writers? This month we cover a pretty wide swath of possible musics, from tech death to ambient electronics to improvised guitar duets. Contributors included Jonathan Shaw, Tim Clarke, Bryon Hayes, Ray Garraty, Jennifer Kelly, Andrew Forell, Bill Meyer and Ian Mathers.

Acausal Intrusion — Panspsychism (I, Voidhanger)

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Acausal Intrusion continues its journey from the extremes of utterly demented tech death (see the band’s first LP, Nulitas) to this most recent version of the band’s sound. To be sure, Panpsychism still disturbs and confounds, but you can track the progression of song forms through most of the record’s eight tracks, and when the needle lifts at the close of “The Beauty Within,” you will likely be able to locate your extremities in physical space. Your mind? That depends. You can get pretty lost in the twists and inversions in the middle section of “This Inward Separation,” and “Molecular Entanglement” works pretty hard to deliver on its title’s premise (hold on tight through the tune’s second half…). Still, these new songs are much more interested in creating interesting riffs and repeating them than in turning the structures of temporality inside out. It may be telling that the longest track on Panpsychism is called “Pillar of Rationality.” Is Acausal Intrusion becoming invested in cause-and-effect relations? Only time will tell — assuming you can figure out which way time is running after giving this record a spin.

Jonathan Shaw

Arrowounds — The Slow Boiling Amphibian Dreamstate (Lost Tribe Sound)

The Slow Boiling Amphibian Dreamstate by ARROWOUNDS

Back in March, Arrowounds’ In the Octopus Pond cast a spell that’s been hard to shake. In my Dusted review I wrote, “Though there are plenty of precedents for what Chamberlain is doing here, there’s a cohesive vision to this record that proves intoxicating.” This follow-up, the aptly titled The Slow Boiling Amphibian Dreamstate, also has a cohesive vision, but one that’s much darker and more abstract than its predecessor. Aside from a distant muted rhythm on opener, “All Life Dissolved in the Deep,” this is a largely beatless album, with ambient textures brought to the fore. For the majority of these 45 minutes, very little happens at all, aside from the looming of unsettling reverberations, throbbing bass tones and modulated sounds that could be the buzzing of flies. There’s the feeling that something ritualistic is unfolding in the shadows, something that may prove to unleash malignant forces. It’s certainly an evocative listen, but one that requires patience and the casting aside of any preconceived expectations. This one’s all about the atmosphere.

Tim Clarke

Blood Oath — Lost in an Eternal Silence (Caligari Records)

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Eternal silence? Not likely when these Chilean freaks are around. Blood Oath plays a proggy variety of death metal, long on musical technique and a lot spacier than not. But those ambitions and atmospherics never get in the way of satisfying tunefulness, and when guitarists Ignacio Canales and Iganacio Riveras (yep, two Iganacios) indulge their desires to shred, there’s plenty of thrashy antics and dive-bombing abandon to enjoy. This reviewer really digs “Reflections of Darkness,” which is shot through with a groovy weirdness; the soloing verges on hair-metal heroics here and there, but in this context, that turns out to be a lot of fun. Lost in Eternal Silence is more smoked out than grossed out, and some of us like our death metal a bit soggier and smellier. But there’s no denying the musical invention on display here, and the speed and dexterity nears intoxicating levels.

Jonathan Shaw

Body/Head — Come On (Longform Editions Remix) (Longform Editions)

Come On (Longform Editions remix) by Body/Head

Kim Gordon and Bill Nace have been exploring the mind-body divide for over a decade, yet they still manage to surprise and delight. The duo sprung the Come On EP on us earlier this year, without notice. Replete with short, song-like impressions, the brief recording was a subtle evolution in the Body/Head oeuvre. They astonish once more with this extended remix of the EP’s leading track, stretching it into a 20-minute ambient opus. Only faint echoes of the piece’s guitar noise remain, as Nace dons his dub producer’s cap to create a smoke-filled atmosphere. Gordon’s sultry voice beckons, yet through time dilation seems to call from the edge of the universe. She and Nace are joined by music video director and Peaches collaborator Vice Cooler, whose slippery synth squiggles add a gritty snarl to the otherwise soothing vapor trails. This is a potent brew, a beguiling chanson rooted firmly in the ever-expanding Body/Head universe.

Bryon Hayes

DJ Muggs — Soul Assassins 3: Death Valley (Soul Assassins Records)

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The third part of the DJ Muggs’ trilogy has got an impressive list of guests. How can one even get a verse from Ice Cube and MC Ren these days? But despite the shocking number of rap stars (many of them fell off, to be honest), hardly anything on Soul Assassins 3: Death Valley feels like a real song. These are projects, with phoned-in verses, and Muggs was just doing construction work, putting these verses together. Only three solo tracks with Boldy James (“It’s On,” “Where We At, and “We Coming For the Safe”) sound like he was really working for it. After half a dozen of listens not a single song sticks in mind. You just keep listing these big names in your head.

Ray Garraty

Duffy X Uhlmann — Doubles (Orindal)

Doubles by Duffy x Uhlmann

Meg Duffy is a heck of a guitar player, witness their support work for Kevin Morby, their own Hand Habits and this year’s yes/and all-instrumental collaboration with Oneohtrix Point Never producer Joel Ford. Now the artist teams up with Gregory Ulhmann, likely encountered on a recent Hand Habits/Perfume Genius tour in 2022 for an album of improvised guitar duets, laid down in one single takes, look ma, no net. These cuts are lovely and varied. “Half Smile” is precise but lyrical. One guitar sets up a clock-like rhythmic foundation, while another splays lingering chords and pensive runs of melody atop this architectural structure. “Etch” is more luxuriant, with high tremulous melody stepping nimbly over scratchy strums and flowering in harp-like profusion. “Which One Is You” has a pulsing, electronic mystery, guitar notes scattered over an eerie Burial-ish atmosphere (or possibly some of that Oneohtrix Point Never influence rubbed off). “Braid” is cerebral and austere, the notes clipped short, so that guitar sounds like a malleted percussion instrument. The two parts interlock like delicately tuned machinery, the one fitting where the other stops, and both dancing in airy, contemplative joy.

Jennifer Kelly

Alabaster DePlume — Come with Fierce Grace (Intl Anthem)

Come With Fierce Grace by Alabaster DePlume

Alabaster DePlume recorded material for these 12 tracks at the same time as he was making GOLD, working with20 other musicians in various configurations and laying far more sound to tape than he could use, even for a double album. And yet while this music is, strictly speaking, leftovers, it is, in some ways, far more visceral and affecting than its sprawling predecessor. The sounds are rougher, warmer and less baroquely poised. There are African rhythms and tones in many of these cuts, in this rumbling, rattling foundations of percussive “To that Voice and Say,” in the desert flutter of spare haunting “Give Me Away.” DePlume, himself, sings less and plays more, entering into swaggering, blistered dialogue with a drummer, in “What Can It Take,” overblowing long, trembling vibrations on abstract “Fall on Flowers.” Where he does foreground singing, it’s likely to be someone else, like the Guinean artist Falle Nioke in “Sibomandi,” carving rough shadow-y blues arcs across complicated volleys of percussion and sax. Or London-based Momoko Gill, who breathes silky smooth R&B lines into a thicket of plucked bass notes, sounding very much like Sade but without the sheen of slick production. I was lukewarm on GOLD, but I like this one a lot. Let’s hear it for leftovers.

Jennifer Kelly

Erik Enocksson — Räkna evighet som intet (Irrlicht/Ideal)

Räkna evighet som intet by Erik Enocksson

Swedish composer Erik Enocksson explores grief and transcendence in two longform pieces on his new release which translates as “Count eternity as nothing.” Written for a string quartet, voices overlaid and electronic effects, with a libretto taken from the poetry of Lotta Lotass, Enocksson invokes the confusion and despair essential to the mourning process and the redemptive power of prayer, poetry and music. The work plays out like a non-linear operetta, shifting between emotional states and intensity.

Part 1 begins with a babble of voices, an invocation. Inchoate strings and electronics gradually coalesce into form, a wordless male voice, cantor-like, answered by a choral libretto based on the poetry of Lotta Lotass. In Part 2 swirls of feedback, like nails on a blackboard, the bottom end of the strings distorted, again searching for meaningful form. The choir liturgical, before Sara Fors’ vulnerable soprano comes to the fore, barely there in lonely prayer, before a lengthy fade into eternal silence. Räkna evighet som intet is a hauntingly evocative work which doesn’t shy from darkness but ends in purifying light.

Andrew Forell

Devin Gray — Most Definitely (Rataplan)

Most Definitely by Rataplan Records

One truth of performance is that the performer spends the whole of their life preparing for something that another person might only see during one brief and circumscribed moment. Devin Gray, a drummer who has worked with Kris Davis, Ellery Eskelin and numerous other singular jazz musicians, recreates that phenomenon on his debut solo recording, Most Definitely. If you want to get in touch with the reflection and effort that go into the self-creation of an artist, go to this album’s Bandcamp page when you have some time and read the two exhaustive texts he wrote for it. But in the spirit the actual music, this review will be brief. Gray limited himself to one six-hour session, during which he improvised from a series of prompts. With one exception, the album’s 23 tracks are quite short, and each uses a laser focus to express a particular sound, idea or transitional event. As befits a guy who is engaged with the freer end of things, but also engaged with the music’s ongoing historical development, you can hear a spectacular breadth of sounds, some of which become brief homages to his inspirations.

Bill Meyer

Anthony Naples — orbs (ANS Recordings)

orbs by Anthony Naples

Dusted last checked in with producer Anthony Naples back in 2015, when Patrick Masterson noted that his Body Pill LP made for a transition away from Naples’ dancefloor work to “a peaceful, nocturnal release built for life’s simple, quiet moments.” On the evidence of the lush, accomplished new orbs, Naples has continued to go in that direction, and it’s paying dividends. From the opening “Moto Verse” finding a middle ground between trip hop and ambient to the closing “Unknow” evoking a kinder, gentler Boards of Canada (albeit with a prominent bassline). orbs succeeds in both its sound design and its construction. These ten tracks (kept to a trim 43 minutes and change, although the pace never feels rushed) seem drawn from the same pool of nighttime calm Naples was channeling back on Body Pill, but if anything his approach has gotten more refined and potent with time.

Ian Mathers

Eddie Prévost / NO Moore /James O’Sullivan / Ross Lambert — CHORD (Shrike)

CHORD by Eddie Prévost | NO Moore | James O’Sullivan | Ross Lambert

Shrike emerged in 2021 as an outlet for London’s thriving free improvisation scene. A survey of their Bandcamp page indicates that capitalization matters, so let’s ponder for a moment the determination to render in all caps something that you’ll listen hard to find on this recording. It is a studio encounter between three electric guitarists and the esteemed percussionist, Eddie Prévost, whose involvement ensures that the music is going to enact a process of exploration, but suffice to say that no one is searching for the lost chord. No, they’re looking for ways to contribute to a dialogue of arcing tones, shimmering decays, rough-edge scraps and feedback that’ll resonate in your ribcage. By dint of being the only non-guitarist, Prévost becomes the agent of contrast and focus across seven absorbing exchanges. It appears that Shrike prioritizes visual presentation, and CHORD’s trifold sleeve is a thing of beauty. One hopes that in the future the label will extend that respect to the format itself and put it on a glass-mastered CD instead of the short-run, blue-faced disc used here.

Bill Meyer

Radian — Distorted Rooms (Thrill Jockey)

Distorted Rooms by Radian

Experimental trio Radian — Martin Brandlmayr on drums and electronics, Martin Siewert on guitars and electronics and John Norman on bass — create a splintered, deconstructed form of post-rock with industrial leanings and the low-slung funkiness of instrumental hip-hop. Their sounds are metallic and dank, often blown out with distortion and scattered across the stereo field to give the listener just enough grounding to follow their rhythms, but frequently upending expectations of where their meandering compositions may venture next. Radian’s last album, 2016’s On Dark Silent Off, is probably their finest and most cohesive to date; their new album, the fittingly titled Distorted Rooms, feels like a more fractured effort, its six tracks taking a more abstract course across 40 minutes of music. The band’s sounds are always interesting, but there are passages here where you have to wait patiently for everything to lock into place. Distorted Rooms’ finest moments are probably “Cicada,” which features some of the record’s more breakneck and addictive rhythms, and finale “S at the Gates,” which coalesces its sound sources into something ominously atmospheric.

Tim Clarke

Shackleton & Waclaw Zimpel ft Siddhartha Belmannu — The Cell of Dreams (7K!)

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The Cell of Dreams is a collaboration between producer Sam Shackleton, Polish polymath Waclaw Zimpel and singer Siddhartha Belmannu. Shackleton and Zimpel use harmonium like drones, keyboards, alto clarinet and hand percussion to develop serpentine trance-like ragas. Singing in his native language Kannada, Belmannu, a rising star in Indian classical music, moves through registers of his voice with magistral grace. The 19-minute opener “The Ocean Lies Between Us” features long cycles of drone and buzz, minimal percussion, lapping water and Belmannu modulated and serene intercut with wordless runs through the higher registers. Not understanding the words, you concentrate solely on his tone and emotion to the extent that when he sings in English on “Everything Must Decay” it takes a little readjustment of focus, but the combination of Belmannu’s voice, Zimpel’s treated alto clarinet and Shackleton’s production effects is mesmerizing.

Andrew Forell

Superposition — Glaciers (Kettle Hole Records)

Glaciers by Superposition

Superposition is Todd Carter and Michael Hartman, who also comprise two thirds of the category-noncompliant trio, TV Pow. TV Pow rarely gets together these days since its members have lives and the third member, Brent Gutzeit, left Chicago years ago. But Superposition’s existence proves that Hartman and Carter are still playing together, and still adhering to the essential TV Pow tenet that if they get in the same room and make some sounds, whether they issue from computers, conversations, made-up instruments or a nice grand piano, those sounds might end up on a record. The ten tracks on Glaciers are made by stacking layers of spare keyboard lines and muffled drum tracks, and periodically interrupting their trundling passage in ways that suggest that something has gone somewhere, then stopped and done something else. If that description seems non-specific, so is the music; while just enough of the track titles relate to glaciers to make you look for a concept album in this stuff, it could just as be set to driving instruction films or the progress of Mario from one side of your video screen to the other. This is a feature, not a bug. Put this on and do something.

Bill Meyer

Thrash Palace — Go (Sub Pop)

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Part of the Sub Pop Singles series, Thrash Palace’s “Go” rips as hard as it’ll go, a bludgeoning assault of guitar noise, thwacked to bits by hard, block-simple drums. You might recognize the singer’s florid, blues-nodding belt or her guttural grunt: that’s EMA doing her best rock goddess. The rest of the band is likewise impressive. Sarah Register of Talk Normal and Kim Gordon’s band plays guitar and XBXRX’s Vice Cooler plays hits those brutalist drums. The flipside “Teenage Spaceship” is quieter but also full of drama. Here EMA’s voice tamps down to a whisper, and the atmosphere envelopes rather than blowing the house down. Both are quite good, intense, theatrical and inventive in a way that evokes Savages and, naturally, Kim Gordon. Thrash on, ladies. We need a full-length.

Jennifer Kelly

Vengeance — Sewer Surge (Dying Victims Productions)

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Nasty, grimy and dank, Sewer Surge is the first proper LP from Vengeance — or, as they seem to prefer, Fukkin Vengeance. That additional term in the band’s name is close to risible, but it helps to distinguish this speed metal act from at least two other Polish metal bands that call themselves Vengeance, in addition to the dozen or so other outfits claiming the moniker (from Brazil, Germany, the States and elsewhere). Polish? Yep, but you’d be forgiven for assuming that an obscure NWOBHM band recorded Sewer Surge sometime in 1983. This is metal for a bar fight, for a biker run, for a night of whites and pints of Ballantine Ale in Sheffield (or in Warsaw, one supposes). The band seems to be clued into the layers of allusion and potential ironical goofiness that come with this sort of earnest love letter to those halcyon days of leather, spikes and Flying Vs: the best tune on the record is called “Disappointing Parking Lot Sex.” That’s really funny, and the song is pretty great. Just don’t expect Fukkin Vengeance to get out of the gutter (or sewer) any time soon.

Jonathan Shaw

Dustin Wong — Perpetual Morphosis (Hausu Mountain)

Perpetual Morphosis by Dustin Wong

Dustin Wong creates outlandish and beautiful sound worlds that are inspired by his limitless creativity. Originally a denizen of the weird and wonderful Baltimore music scene – he was a member of both Ecstatic Sunshine and Ponytail – the guitarist has since created a solo career around his mastery of loop pedals. Not keen to sit still, Wong continues to extend his performative toolbox. Perpetual Morphosis, his sophomore Hausu Mountain joint, finds Wong fusing instrumentation and digitally sourced sounds. The resulting compositions reside somewhere between the intricate patterns of American minimalism and the post-modern zaniness emanating from the Orange Milk catalog. Fractalized percussive patterns bounce around, obfuscated by neon-colored tone clouds and the gently wafting breeze of Wong’s treated vocalizing. His guitar interjects repeatedly as we traverse this technicolor dream world, zooming in and out of focus as the composer straddles the fragile boundary between inspiration and outright madness. Perpetual Morphosis pokes at Wong’s charged up cerebellum, proffering a pleasant jolt in the process.

Bryon Hayes

75 Dollar Bill — Power Failures (Karl Records)

Power Failures by 75 DOLLAR BILL

75 Dollar Bill was that last band I saw before the pandemic closed everything down. They played a riveting set in a refurbished industrial space on the campus of Amherst College about a week into 2020, and, as a famous playwright put it, the rest is silence, at least for a couple of years. Power Failures comes from that period, as the two principals put together live and unreleased recordings as a way to stay relevant during the lockdown. It came out digitally in 2020 and is just now getting the vinyl treatment. The disc captures 75 Dollar Bill’s hallucinatory desert blues drone, its long haunted notes, punctuated by an ecstatic, primal drumming. Sounds of audiences, of birds, of children filter in through these shape shifting meditations, incorporating the real world like certain just-before-the-alarm dreams bring ambient noises into their narratives. “Snow Jumper’s Harp” shimmers and smolders, the steady friction of shaken percussion intersecting with an elemental blues riff repeated till it transcends itself. “15 (YASI)” sputters with electric distortion, knocks insistently on wood. A flute comes in, dreaming its own dreams. It is very serene, but also full of fire. The long set recorded at the Noguchi Gardens in Queens allows the sounds of nature to drift past, as Che Chen searches for the essence of single notes, letting them hang, repeating them, letting them die out, stopping time, in a good way, not the way the pandemic did.

Jennifer Kelly

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scrubf1re · 1 year

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December 2021 vs December 2022

For Christmas I decided to remake that one fanart of Meimei in her christmas swimsuit (which depending on which hemisphere you live would either be fitting or ironic to wear and considering Meiko's canonically japanese I'd say it's ironic). I'd say the difference is night and day. Made via tracing over this random image of a mannequin I found online for the main body:https://www.bigstockphoto.com/image-814575/stock-photo-mannequin-in-bikini and an anime figure's arm for her right arm:https://sugotoys.com.au/product/freeing-bstyle-beatless-lacia-bunny-ver-14-scale-pvc-figure/

original version just by itself:https://scrubf1re.tumblr.com/post/672030919472889856/just-something-i-made-for-the-end-of-the-year

#digimon #digimon adventure tri #digimon tri #digimon adventure #meimei #Meiko Mochizuki #christmas #Mochizuki Meiko #meikomochizuki

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my-anime-goods · 2 years

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Beatless - 1/4 Lacia: Bunny Ver. Figure by Freeing. Release: May 2022

#beatless #lacia #freeing #figure

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good-smile-company · 5 years

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レイシア 2018 <BLACK MONOLITH>展開Ver.

http://www.goodsmile.info/ja/product/8220

レイシア 2018Ver.

http://www.goodsmile.info/ja/product/8221

#good smile company #figure #scale figure #beatless #レイシア #lacia

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hypetokyo · 5 years

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BEATLESS Nendoroid : Lacia

http://bit.ly/2SEN

www.hype.tokyo

http://bit.ly/2q3sbBU

#beatless #lacia #nendoroid #action figure #anime #hypetokyo

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goodsmilecompany · 6 years

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【PRE-ORDER】1/8th Scale Lacia 2011 Version (re-release)

➡️ http://www.goodsmile.info/en/product/7254

From the popular anime series "BEATLESS" comes a re-release of the figure that could very well be called the origin of the series - the Lacia figure that was released as the "BEATLESS Introduction Set" back in 2011! The high-quality figure captures Lacia's delicate and supple body, as well as the huge device she holds behind her.

- Kitty ❀

#beatless #beatless lacia #lacia #scale figure #kadokawa #Good Smile #good smile company #gsc

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ousooo · 3 years

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Out Now: FURTHERSET - TO LIVE TENDERLY ANEW

Furtherset — To Live Tenderly Anew — OUS031 — Album

Release: December 11, 2020 Format: cassette + digital Order on Bandcamp Listen on Spotify

«I am interested in pushing the compositional methods I’ve developed to their limits. I’m interested in density, intensity, fragility, and emotions.» - Furtherset

Furtherset returns to -OUS with his album ‘To Live Tenderly Anew’, following his EPs ‘To Alter and Affect’ and ‘Drawings of Desire and Hate’. He notes: “I think of my previous two EPs for -OUS and this album as a trilogy, where this album is the final chapter”. Furtherset is in search of hidden connections beyond harmonies and rhythm. Melodies are repeated until they reach their breaking point. Moments of relief are drowned out in densely packed sound. Intensity is maximized to the nth degree, creating a crest point that threatens to overwhelm pre-existing traces of activity completely. The opening track ‘To Live Tenderly Anew’ begins with a fragile melody, only to erupt into pulsating synthesizer figures that continuously expand, before pulverizing into sharp, noise-flecked fragments, and finally dissolving into an ambient pad. Midway-through ‘The Logic of a Secret’, the music finally sparks into Furtherset’s signature arpeggio patterns, sprinting over a powerful bassline. The album finally climaxes with ‘Choirs of Deception and Truth’, a beatless rave hymn, before it, too, dissolves into deep space.

Using only synthesizers, Furtherset creates metamorphic music, drawing on ambient, modern classical and rave, and building on his individual approach to composition, where long fades and periodic cuts continuously transform the scene.

The album’s title references Amelia Rosselli’s 1956 poem ‘Diario in tre lingue’, in which the experimental writer - who was born in exile in Paris, moved to the UK after the murder of her anti-fascist activist father, was educated in the US and finally settled in Rome - charts relations between the Italian, the French & the English. This poem laid the groundwork for her singular trilingual poetry, a body of work engaged in the research of tradition, and how tradition is passed on in disjointed manifestations.

___Tracklist

01 Furtherset - To Live Tenderly Anew 02 Furtherset - The Expanding Drama 03 Furtherset - The Logic of a Secret 04 Furtherset - A Prelude to Infinite Directions 05 Furtherset - Uncoordinated Delicate Perfection 06 Furtherset - Choirs of Deception and Truth

___Release

Release: December 11, 2020 Format: cassette + digital

___Credits

All tracks written and produced by Tommaso Pandolfi Mixed and mastered by VFBM Drawings by Tommaso Pandolfi Graphic design by Sarah Parsons

___Shops

-OUS Bandcamp / Kudos / Boomkat / Juno / Deejay.de / Beatport / Apple Music / Spotify

#OUS031 #Furtherset #releases

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demytasse · 4 years

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[Shinzaya] Blindsight —Prologue

(Dullahan Izaya AU) A slice of life fic that starts at the point where Shinra and Izaya first meet and continues through the years. It’s rather wabisabi-esque, and really, it’s an outlet for my over-abundant fuwafuwa, dokidoki feelings for these two...and an excuse for me to gush over them...yet again. ( ´͈ ᵕ `͈) Inspired from a ‘what it...’ ask that @vanitasmisora sent.

—

Izaya was aware of how unique he was.

If he couldn't gather that from centuries of experience then he was far unworthy of those years. Even if he were given leeway for his lost memories it’d still be a travesty of the high intellect he believed himself to have; because he had such a distinct weight of isolation without a discernible reason for it, which if he had one takeaway from that feeling it would be that he lacked comrades.

Izaya knew his rationale hadn’t fooled him. If it had then he wouldn’t be in his current place—laid out and tied down, upon an operating table that was likely the only one to ever hold one of his kind: a dullahan of Celtic myth. Indeed, if there were another like himself then there wouldn’t be such a fuss over his presence.

There wouldn’t be doctoral associates looming over his bare, vulnerable body.

Nor would there be murmured interest among them.

And most certainly there wouldn’t be an excitable kid boosted on the table edge to get a better view of a headless being; whose smile broke the boundary of his surgical mask with wonderment up to his eyes, his voiceless audible and better viewed than anything.

"Wow…"

Out of those in the room, Izaya had an inkling that this child was the oddest one of the bunch—perhaps even more amongst people in the outside world.

Which once again Izaya could relate, if not in the past at least in the present.

It was with his dismal self-awareness that the dullahan was immediately enamoured of his table-mate who remained ignorant of the hustle around him. Izaya and this boy; likely the sore-thumbs in every crowd they could find themselves in.

—

"Time isn’t patient, Shinra. Especially with this particular patient."

From Izaya's vantage was an older man frigid in his smock that often presented himself with pep to counterbalance his off-putting vibe; he watched as he threw a glance to his carbon copy.

"Any son of mine wouldn’t procrastinate under these circumstances. He would cut with his scalpel rather than corners."

For all intents and purposes, the son he unfairly chastised was too green for the laboratory in the first place, though Izaya knew the organization which hosted these experiments hardly cared.

Though that made the situation worse.

"A-ah! R-right."

It was obvious that this kid wasn’t ready.

Perhaps it wasn’t due to his nerves, not fully, as inexperience seemed to only mildly affect him, but that wasn’t quite it.

No—in actuality it looked like he just wanted more time to gape. He was so young that a living corpse was something to revel like he’d already been and continued to.

It was clear that Izaya wasn’t just some experiment.

And maybe his father’s expert advice was correct, that time is of the essence or whatever idiomatic babble he’d used earlier. Still, it was harsh to sever innocence from his son, it being important to let a kid be a kid. That ripe curiosity was something to appreciate.

And Izaya did. Unexpectedly.

The kid nervously patted himself down, looking for a tool he seemed to have lost.

His father as he shook his head in disapproval. “I’m going to overlook your shameful disregard of proper sanitary practices this time...it’s not that it matters given your patient.”

A scalpel was offered and suddenly excitement took over his frantic nerves. Shinra snatched it—like he did his unique opportunity to dissect a cryptid; a chance most wouldn’t even think to dream of.

Once he did, his attention snapped back to Izaya with a giddy expression, like his emotions spoke for him.

‘Look, look! We get to play with one another now!’

It was pure, innocent human fascination. As it would seem, Izaya shared fascination of his own, and if anything could dull the excruciating pain of his conscious-mind dissection it would be this miracle anaesthesia as not only traditional methods were proven ineffective, but this intrigue…

...it was far stronger on its own.

Izaya’s own curiosity could dissuade the pain. In awe, he could observe the sloppy method of his prosector—Shinra.

To use his name would give proper respect to whom he regarded a send from some god he may have known before his memories were stripped.

Shinra’s excitement made him quiver, the knife loose in his fingers almost dropped. Under his breath, he ran through steps, notes that he may have written out and studied until the paper was more like a napkin.

“...use the drawn mark as a guide…

“...place the tip at the top…

“...adjust the angle of the blade…”

And then he paused—Izaya was left antsy for the incision.

"Dad...I’m not sure if I'm doing it right." Shinra tested the correct pressure as he shook more.

"Trial and error. Figure it out as you go along, my boy. It’s not like he feels pain... at least not like any human I know." He chuckled.

Given who Shingen was, the humans he knew were probably more than the handful present, perhaps an entire surgical department’s worth and possibly more than the members exclusive to Nebula.

Izaya didn’t know the breadth of his connections, but he did know that the man probably didn’t know any of them.

Sadly, his son was among that lot.

“Okay…”

Things picked up as Shinra caught his bearings. He lost some of his disruptive nerves, but never fully; he’d held back a fraction like he needed permission—rather—a reminder that what he was performing was a dissection akin to a dead animal so what he was doing wasn’t ethical abuse.

Which ethics, did he even have any?

If the boy was raised in another household then maybe he’d be instilled with a rational sense of right or wrong.

Given his circumstances, if a medical commentator interrupted to ask for his morals his response would be confusion, a cocked head, and an immediate return to his slice and dice, his palpation of useless organs.

Aside from morals, Izaya was reassured that it didn’t matter. Between squelches of intestines and kidneys, the squash of the liver and stomach, the mini surgeon would check in with his patient. Not to take note of his reactions as data points, but to actually check in with him. As if he began to connect subtle body movements to certain kinds of pain, pinpoint the times when he relaxed and what prompted them, astutely notice Izaya’s own fixation, thusly resonated with the reverb of his silent pain.

The boy offered his sympathy. Ethics and morals—even if they were held they wouldn’t hold up against Shinra’s conscience, untampered and untainted.

He was mature in his own way, adultlike when he shouldn’t have been and had more regard of life than everyone in the lab put together and that was a travesty of the supposedly intellectual human race.

But due to that innocent compassion, Izaya lost all sense of harsh reality as Shinra took care of him in a way that differed from a dissection.

Izaya was being examined bit-by-bloodless-bit, being accounted for internal pieces and their proper placement, yet only focused on Shinra. Later on, he’d discover that he saw the kid as ‘adorable’ while at the moment he hadn’t the term.

Shinra nodded with a final glance, ‘don’t worry, I’m almost done.’

He moved on—right side of the chest cavity to the left—stopped at an organ beneath his fingertips and slipped them under to remove it. None of his other organs had been handled delicately, in fact, none of them had been removed.

Thus the importance was heavy.

Shinra took Izaya’s heart from his beatless chest into a cradle of his hands—he almost bowed in respect of its beauty.

"...dad, what's his name…?"

Izaya was aware of how unique Shinra was.

"Shinra! Just concentrate."

Inhuman or not, the dullahan would’ve been heartless not recognise Shinra’s unrivalled passion. Even with his heart absent from his chest, it was obvious.

Apart from drone adults, Shinra was an interesting specimen himself. He who gave Izaya hope that he wouldn't experience his rebooted lifetime from the reflection of dead-eyed, veteran surgeons; wisened men and women long disenchanted by their craft.

"What's his name," Shinra demanded.

"Where did this insubordination suddenly come from?”

Though Shinra kept to the scrutiny of his trophy organ.

“Simply blasphemous.” Shingen blotted sweat with his sleeve, sighed. “It's... Isaiah…?”

Overhead light reflected off his goggles while he pretended to search his memories until he hazarded a glance down at his son.

He exuded pride, his obstructed smile endearing. “Ah, right, I believe it’s...Izaya.”

As Shinra was given a name he perked up—to which Shingen nudged him to proceed after he noticed the returned vigour.

“Now replace his heart before the incision closes."

Shinra fell into an obsession of Izaya’s entire being, heart and all. With a proven myth and supernatural existence; a specimen that appeared human yet uniquely dazzled.

An aberration, a head above the rest with one less above its neck. A dullahan, but far more a beauty to cherish.

Though the rest of Shinra remained a mystery to Izaya; at that particular place and time, all that was uncovered was fascination. The boy’s brain could’ve been splayed like Izaya on the table—his psyche could have been revealed for all to see and yet the details would still be undefined.

All but one thing wouldn’t be a puzzle.

Shinra, with a heart at the level of his own, would make damn sure of what he paid explicit mind to for all his years...

"Izaya…"

At that the two were ensnared. Shinra and Izaya were beholden of each other’s perception of love; taken on a ride through various versions of the concept in tow of an unreliable source of emotional intelligence.

"...it's nice to meet you."

All in a moment they saw the world eye to eye, if only by blindsight.

——

AN: Did I mention? I get a little romantically morbid...>w>; I absolutely adore lil Shinra, so I put extra care into writing him. This is the wordiest part of the fic, the rest of the chapters will be shorter, I just wanted to set up the story first. ♡

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animebw · 4 years

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Binge-Watching: Welcome to the NHK, Episodes 7-9

In which Sato’s mom is the best, the romance doesn’t work for me, and Yamazaki makes me wonder how well this show is actually going about its themes.

Best Mom

Last time, I mentioned that Sato’s at his most sympathetic whenever the more well-adjusted people around him are able to pull him out of his own head and force him to confront the parts of himself he doesn’t like. Well, that’s proven right in the biggest way possible when his mom phones him and tells him she’s coming over to visit. There’s no better way to reality-check a self-centered character than bringing in the sole people who know him better than he knows himself. And amazingly, Sato’s mom is the one thing he struggles to deal with the most: accepting. She’s genuinely looking out for him and hoping he’s at a good place in life! She’s overjoyed when he tells her he’s set for work and marriage! But when she easily sees through his flimsy lies, she doesn’t judge him for still standing at a crossroads in his life. She trusts him to figure his shit out, because she’s his mom, and she knows him well enough warts and all. That’s really fucking sweet. And it’s hilarious to watch this doofus scramble around trying to keep her from finding out the truth about his life when she couldn’t care less how little he’s living up to her expectations (”It’s a single guy’s apartment, so I expect there’s no place to step anyway.”) She just wants him to be happy! As long as he’s aiming for that, he doesn’t have to be anything but himself.

And that simple, sincere affection is the one thing Sato can’t run away from. He can’t hide himself behind a million white lies and walls of posturing irony when she couldn’t give a fig about that stuff. He can’t get defensive about his faults when she doesn’t shame him for what she already knows he’s ashamed of. She sees through him right to his core, and in doing so, she forces Sato to see himself in that same unflinching light. There’s a fantastic moment right after he hangs up where he starts getting angry at his mom for buying his obvious lies so easily, and it’s clear how much of that hate is really directed at himself for not trusting her in the first place. She cares about him, and he can’t bring himself to be honest with her. Even after promising himself as a child he’d never lie to her again, he was so pathetic that he ended up doing so regardless. And the guilt of that failure brings forth his bravest, most honest introspection yet, finally forcing himself to try and be better for the sake of the woman who believes he’s capable of it. God, I have never cared more for Sato than when he recognizes how shitty he’s being in the restaurant and accepts the pain that brings. There’s a real humanity to his connection with his mom, and it gives me more hope than ever that he’ll find his way out of this spiral.

Beatless

It’s unfortunate, then, that not all the developments over the course of these episodes are that positive. I think part of me was hoping against all odds that Misaki and Sato wouldn’t go in a romantic direction. Yeah, I’ve seen enough anime (and other kinds of media, to be fair) toknow a boy-meets-girl story when I see one, but considering this show is trying to be about a guy overcoming his darkest attitudes and accepting real life over his otaku fantasies, saddling him with a barely-legal wish-fulfillment fantasy girlfriend like Misaki feels like the least self-aware direction it could’ve gone. Like, on the one hand, you have this very clear understanding of why Sato’s toxic mindsets are wrong, and the show constantly mocks the conspiracy-mongering and narcissism he uses to compensate for his lack of self-worth. But on the other hand, the main source of inspiration helping him improve is an eighteen-year-old girl who’s completely devoted to him, spends all her on-screen time working for his sake, and hasn’t really given us any sense of her interior life beyond her dedication to Sato. And just to drive the incongruity home, Sato’s rewarding with contrived Lucky Pervert moments where he sees her panties or her boobs press up against him, and she prances around him room posing in cute, revealing clothes. And it’s just bafflingly misguided. The first episode was very clear in making Sato’s masturbation fantasies of her solely his fantasies and not reflective of reality at all, but now it feels like those fantasies are bleeding in reality. Oh, I guess socially awkward, unpleasant NEETS struggling with self-loathing do deserve a cute, quirky, nonthreatening girlfriend who’ll help them tidy their lives up because they’re too lazy to do it themselves.

Yes, it’s clear Misaki has something else going on. She knows more about him than she could possibly know from just their recent interactions, and she’s confirmed they’ve met and talked in the past, but she’s playing very coy about what their past connection actually was (”My grandfather is French. His name’s Georges Brufelles.”) There is a reason why she’s so interested in this one weird gross dude. But the longer that reason takes to manifest, the more it feels like Welcome to the NHK is undermining its own good intentions by playing into the very indulgences it’s supposedly trying to critique.

Bird’s Eye View

Still, I do acknowledge what a hard task this show is trying to pull off. It’s not easy to make you empathize with characters who are designed to be this off-putting in an all-too-familiar way. And Welcome to the NHK is stuck in a weird place where it’s accurately portraying how gross some otaku can be while still trying to make you sympathize with them in spite of their acknowledged grossness. Yamazaki’s probably the clearest example of this attitude; the dude’s an unrepentant incel who rages against all womankind because his first crush tried to let him down gently. He hides behind the mask of a costumed hero as he demands that all “villains,” i.e. women, be gone from the world, using nerd culture itself as a weapon in his misogynistic tirade. Meanwhile, the show takes care to present how his abrasive, uncompromising, condescending attitude is actually what’s driving people away from him, to the point where no one wants to invite him to social meets because they don’t want to put up with his bullshit. Yamazaki projects his bad experiences onto the entirety of society as evidence of some big conspiracy, but he’s really just a shitty dude with no idea of what he’s talking about. And all it takes is the girl he’s crushing on now deciding they can go to the fireworks after all to make him realize that maybe he shouldn’t judge all his relationships with women off one bad experience when he was six with a girl who really wasn’t trying to hurt him at all.

So that’s Yamazaki’s “dark side,” if we want to call it that. And the show makes no bones about offering up his red-pilled rantings for mockery. But he’s also the supporting friend character who offers Sato a shoulder to lean on in trying times. So we’re asked to still appreciate him at least a little, even as the vast majority of his screen time is spent on dickless over-reactions to girls not wanting to date a pathetic jackwad like him. And I don’t know if I’m able to do that. Yes, people are flawed, and someone can be an asshole in some ways while still having redeeming qualities. But when the sentient 4Chan troll is given a richer interior life and more dynamic personality than the main love interest, I start to lose faith in this show’s willingness to really tackle the ugliness of otaku culture. Hopefully I’m proven wrong, because I’d hate for Welcome to the NHK to become a representative of the very attitudes it’s trying to critique.

Odds and Ends

-Dare I ask why your delusions include the Soul Eater sun, Sato?

-”I don’t even want to live. But dying’s a pain in the ass too.” You and Rei Kiriyama would get along well.

-”Damn it! I answered it!” lol, whoops

-”And I didn’t mention, but there’s someone I’m thinking of marrying as well!” He says, as the camera pans over his figurine’s panty-clad ass. Someone was having way too much fun with that shot.

-”Wonderful Fantastic Dream Gal-Games Company Created by Sato and Yamazaki From MH For the Future.” Sure, let’s go with that.

-”We’ll just use her as the receptionist!” skdjfhskjhdfksjd

-”Operation: Just Toss Everything Onto My Bed!” Alright, stop calling me out.

-I miss eating out at Chinese restaurants, man. Takeout just isn’t the same.

-Yep, that’s the reality of working on a creative project: the drudgery of actually putting it together.

-”That means you’re in love with her!” “Now that you mention it...” sdkjfhskdjfhs okay that made me laugh

-”Romantic love is a trap to expand the capitalist system!” Oh joy, he’s one of those Redditors.

Man, this is gonna be fascinating. See you next time!

#anime #the anime binge-watcher #tabw #welcome to the nhk #welcome to the nhk!#nhk ni youkoso!#nhk ni youkoso

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