Goat - 2023 - Joy In Fear

NAKID – NKD09

 The cover resembles a formal portrait that has been partially swallowed by its own paint. Pale arms or columns descend from above, framing a black central mass whose orange curve might be a mouth, collar, opening or wound. A small red-and-white form hangs at the left like an eye separated from its face. Pink, brown, gray and violet have been rubbed together until the human figure, if there ever was one, remains present only as posture and pressure. JOY IN FEAR is scratched faintly across the darkness, almost too embarrassed or frightened to identify itself.

Tomoo Gokita’s painting provides the correct kind of uncertainty for goat. The image feels figurative and abstract simultaneously, just as the music feels intensely physical while continually escaping the ordinary identities of the instruments producing it. A guitar does not need to behave like a guitar. A saxophone can be stripped of melody until only breath, valve noise and a compressed bark remain. A drum may establish several incompatible clocks at once. The listener keeps sensing a body inside the design but cannot determine exactly where its boundaries begin.

This is not the Swedish Goat of masks, fuzz guitar and psychedelic mythology. This goat was formed in Osaka by composer and guitarist Koshiro Hino, and its central mystery is less mythical than mechanical: how can five human beings perform music whose precision initially seems to require sequencing software? Joy In Fear takes patterns that could have been constructed inside a computer and returns them to bodies, where every entrance remains vulnerable to fatigue, hesitation and error. The musicians aim for the certainty of machines while preserving the fact that certainty is impossible.

That impossibility creates the fear in the title. The joy comes when all five musicians enter the same impossible structure and keep it standing.

Hino has described goat not simply as a band but as a rhythm ensemble. That distinction is important. Guitar, bass, saxophone, drums, percussion and flutes are not arranged according to the usual rock hierarchy, where rhythm supports melody and individual expression rises above the foundation. Every instrument contributes pieces of rhythmic information. A muted guitar note may function like a woodblock. A saxophone key becomes percussion. A bass phrase may repeat across a different number of beats than the drums beneath it, causing the relationship between them to change each time the patterns meet.

The music therefore moves without necessarily developing in the familiar sense. A phrase does not have to become a chorus, solo or climax. Several short patterns continue at different lengths, and their points of contact keep migrating. What changes is not always the material itself, but the listener’s position inside it. A sound that appeared to mark the beginning may later feel like the end. The downbeat becomes uncertain. The same loop seems to rotate, although none of its individual parts has moved.

Joy In Fear arrived eight years after Rhythm & Sound and during the group’s tenth anniversary. That gap was not casual inactivity. Goat’s original drummer left in 2016, forcing Hino to reconsider a compositional system that depended upon the exact physical characteristics of particular players. Rather than finding someone to reproduce the previous chemistry, he gradually rebuilt the group around another method. Takafumi Okada entered on drums, and former Kodo performer Rai Tateishi expanded the available sound through percussion, bamboo flute and Irish flute. The ensemble became a five-person organism capable of changing instruments according to the requirements of each composition.

This transformation explains why the album simultaneously sounds unmistakably like goat and unlike either of its predecessors. The early records often built toward explosive stop-and-start releases, deriving intensity from the sudden interruption and restoration of forward motion. Joy In Fear is more interested in patterns sliding across one another over time. The musicians may repeat relatively simple phrases in different meters, allowing the larger arrangement to generate combinations that nobody appears to be playing individually.

The opening “Hereafter” lasts only one minute and contains less information than almost anything goat had previously recorded. That sparseness is deliberate. Hino recognized that the longer compositions ask an enormous amount from the listener, so he created a short runway into the album’s first major rhythmic event. The track does not summarize what follows. It prepares the nervous system for impact.

The title also establishes a temporal question. “Hereafter” may mean the future, the afterlife or simply everything beyond the present threshold. Goat’s rhythms often seem to proceed according to knowledge arriving from slightly ahead of the listener. A pattern enters before we understand its relationship to the others. Several repetitions later, its purpose becomes audible, only for the entire structure to rotate again. The hereafter is continually entering the present one fragment at a time.

Then “III I IIII III” arrives.

The Roman-numeral title is not philosophical code but rhythmic notation. Its grouped marks describe part of the main pattern as three, one, four, three. The page has become a primitive drum machine, each vertical line a small impact waiting to be sounded. The title refuses to give the listener an image, story or emotional instruction. It provides a counting mechanism and lets the body discover what the count means.

The piece originated in music Hino composed for choreographer Cindy Van Acker, then was substantially rearranged to display the recognizable goat language within the new lineup. It begins with the severe pleasure of parts fitting too tightly. Guitar, bass, drums and saxophone produce a dry chatter whose individual attacks appear separated from one another by microscopic pieces of air. There is almost no decorative sustain. Every sound is a point, and the points gradually reveal a shape.

This is where goat’s relationship with electronic dance music becomes more useful than simply calling the group math rock. The complexity is not presented as a puzzle to admire from outside. Repetition directs it toward bodily entrainment. The listener may be unable to count every meter, but the nervous system begins forming predictions. The music then delays, redirects or fulfills those predictions with the precision of an exceptionally strange club track.

Hino has described musical pleasure as waiting, waiting and waiting before release. In conventional pop, the chorus frequently supplies the promised pleasure. In goat, release may occur when several repeating patterns finally coincide after spending minutes drifting across one another. The moment can be tiny, perhaps only one emphatic strike or sudden opening of frequency, but the accumulated waiting makes it feel enormous.

The musicians must also endure that waiting physically. A sequencer can repeat the same awkward phrase indefinitely without anxiety. Human players know that each successful repetition increases the distance they have available to fall. The longer the pattern continues, the more its precision becomes charged. Every note contains the possibility that the entire structure may separate at the joints.

“Cold Heat” is the album’s first major opening. The guitar disappears completely, removing the instrument most closely associated with Hino and allowing another goat to emerge. Bass and drums form the ground beneath several kkwaenggwari, small Korean gongs that Hino placed on cushions and struck with mallets rather than holding and playing conventionally. This unusual treatment gives the metal an unstable, prepared-piano character, somewhere between bell, bent sheet and liquid machinery.

Above that structure, Tateishi plays Irish flute and shinobue while Akihiko Ando contributes saxophone. These wind instruments introduce breath, sustained tone and a comparatively open sense of movement into music previously dominated by short attacks. The title’s contradiction becomes audible. The percussion is cold, metallic and exact, while the breath carries heat. The flutes sound organic, but their processed or carefully controlled lines can feel less human than the metal beneath them.

The piece grew partly from Hino’s encounter with samul nori musicians at Kodo’s Earth Celebration in 2019. Yet “Cold Heat” does not reproduce Korean traditional practice or use the kkwaenggwari as an easy sign of cultural otherness. Hino studies the physical object, alters its position and discovers another acoustic possibility inside it. That method describes goat as a whole. An instrument’s established technique is not rejected through contempt. It is suspended long enough to ask what else the material can do.

Tateishi’s arrival also introduces greater freedom into a project known for severe control. Hino discussed flute techniques and processing with him, including ideas associated with Jon Hassell, but permitted more improvisational movement than goat’s compositions usually contain. That relative freedom does not dissolve the structure. It floats above an exceptionally stable rhythmic field, creating the feeling that the air has begun behaving differently while the ground remains locked.

The contrast makes “Cold Heat” a genuine statement rather than an ornamental expansion of the band’s palette. Goat has not added flute to make its existing music prettier. The group has changed the balance of composition enough that an older listener must learn how to recognize it again.

“Warped” compresses the new method into less than four minutes. The piece is built from two congas and one bongo, with small bells or cymbals placed upside down upon the drumheads. When struck, the metal rocks against the skin and changes the pitch of the drum beneath it. The composition is predetermined, but its sound remains physically unstable.

That difference between fixed structure and unpredictable surface is crucial. A player can strike at the correct moment with the correct force, yet the wobbling metal may produce a slightly different bend each time. Human precision activates material disorder. The title refers to a warped record, and the percussion seems to undergo the same slow deformation as a groove passing beneath an uneven stylus.

This is perhaps the album’s clearest answer to machine perfection. Goat does not make its music human merely by allowing mistakes. The group designs systems in which exact performance produces events that cannot be completely controlled. Discipline and instability are not enemies. Each makes the other audible.

“Warped” also changes the listener’s sense of pitch. There is no conventional melodic line to follow, yet the bending drumheads create moving tonal relationships. Rhythm begins secreting melody. What sounds like a damaged recording is actually a live acoustic event, while the apparently primitive percussion setup produces an effect associated with malfunctioning reproduction technology.

“Modal Flower” expands into one of the album’s most complete constructions. The title borrows “modal” from jazz without claiming that the piece is modal jazz. Hino seems to use the word as an analogy for a system that can remain simple at the local level while becoming richly complex through sustained exploration. Drums and bass offer a comparatively accessible rhythmic route, while the guitar follows a less cooperative meter across them.

The result is a flower not because the composition gradually becomes prettier, but because several repeating structures open around the same center. Each petal appears related to the others while occupying a different position. The pattern’s complexity is produced by symmetry, recurrence and slight displacement rather than by continuous addition.

Ando’s saxophone was introduced late in the process after Hino felt the piece remained structurally incomplete. Its arrival changed the composition dramatically. The saxophone does not perform the traditional function of a jazz soloist soaring above the rhythm section. It operates closer to a cutting tool, emphasizing certain intersections and altering the perceived shape of the patterns beneath it.

This is one of goat’s great reversals. Instruments normally associated with personal expression are made collective and architectural. Ando’s breath remains individual, but it is deployed to change how the ensemble’s larger mechanism is perceived. The saxophone does not escape the grid. It reveals another grid hiding inside it.

“Modal Flower” also demonstrates why technical description alone cannot explain this record. One can list meters, phrase lengths and entrances without capturing the bodily effect. The music feels tense, but not emotionally cold. It can produce the alert pleasure of watching several dangerous objects move through the same narrow space without colliding. After enough repetition, the apparent danger becomes exhilaration.

“Spray” initially shared enough character with “Modal Flower” that Hino considered separating the pieces or removing one from the album. Instead, he placed them together and used recording space to create the difference. “Modal Flower” is mixed as a centered mass, its instruments combining into one concentrated body. “Spray” pulls the elements apart, with guitar and bongo pushed toward opposite sides of the stereo field.

The sequence therefore changes from object to environment. “Modal Flower” stands in front of the listener as one complicated apparatus. “Spray” places the listener inside an apparatus whose components are firing from different locations. Headphones expose the separation clearly, but speakers allow the room itself to participate. The sound is no longer merely travelling toward the listener. It crosses in front of and around the body.

Hino traced this approach partly to hearing classic rock through a Klipsch AK6 system and recognizing how dramatically records by Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin had been designed for loudspeaker placement. Goat’s music may sound far removed from arena rock, yet “Spray” shares its understanding that stereo is not a neutral container. Position can become composition.

The title captures this dispersal. A spray is made from separate particles sharing direction and force. From a distance it appears continuous; nearby, it consists of innumerable individual impacts. Goat’s music functions the same way. The groove is real, but it is created from fragments distributed across instruments, meters and locations.

The listener can choose where to stand mentally. Follow the bass and the guitar becomes interference. Follow the percussion and the saxophone becomes an irregular atmosphere. Attempt to hear everything simultaneously and the piece begins resembling a moving diagram whose complete image cannot be held in consciousness for long.

This limitation is not failure. It is one of the album’s pleasures. Joy In Fear repeatedly exceeds the listener’s ability to organize it, then offers another route through the same material. Replaying the record does not simply reveal details missed previously. It can produce a different center of gravity.

“GMF” closes the album by abandoning the ordinary band configuration almost completely. Hino, bassist Atsumi Tagami and drummer Okada share a single gamelan instrument, each repeating a short Morse-code-like phrase with a different meter. The phrases last only a few seconds and remain essentially unchanged, but their uneven lengths cause new composite melodies to appear continually.

The same three musicians overdub wooden temple blocks, using related phrases but entering at deliberately loose moments so the second layer does not line up neatly with the first. Tateishi then contributes improvised flute. The result is at once highly regulated and strangely detached from regulation, as though several automated systems have begun operating independently inside one ceremonial room.

“GMF” exposes a paradox beneath the entire record. The more severely each musician limits individual choice, the more unpredictable the collective pattern becomes. Nobody needs to invent a constant stream of new material. Newness emerges from relationship. Three fixed phrases create a fourth event that belongs to no single player.

This resembles social life at its most functional. Each person performs a small repeated responsibility, but the total structure remains larger than anyone’s intention. Goat makes that invisible surplus audible. The ensemble is not merely the addition of five musicians. It is the changing field created between them.

The wooden blocks and gamelan also bring another kind of material history into the record. These objects carry ceremonial, religious and regional associations, but goat does not attempt to simulate a traditional ensemble. Hino treats them as acoustic systems whose overtones and physical response can enter his polymetric method. The result is neither electronic music nor ethnographic reconstruction. It is a new machine built from old resonant matter and human concentration.

Rashad Becker’s mastering is especially important here. The record contains many short, dry attacks that could easily collapse into brittle flatness, while its metallic overtones could become exhausting if exaggerated. Instead, each sound retains enough body to feel produced by an object in a room. The precision remains sharp, but not bloodless.

Bunsho Nishikawa’s recording and mixing similarly preserve the difference between the group’s two kinds of unity. At times, the players must sound like one machine. Elsewhere, as in “Spray,” separation is the central event. The album’s engineering does not apply one coherent surface to everything. It changes the spatial law from piece to piece.

Tracks one and seven were recorded by Hino himself, forming a quiet technical bracket around the five principal studio constructions. “Hereafter” prepares the machine to begin. “GMF” dismantles the conventional lineup and lets another machine continue after the album’s apparent end. The record opens with reduced information and closes with patterns capable of generating more information than the listener can contain.

The artwork makes greater sense after hearing this. Gokita’s central figure appears simultaneously concentrated and erased. Its parts do not resolve into a reliable anatomy, but they remain held together by posture, weight and the memory of representation. Goat’s music also preserves the idea of a band while removing many of the habits by which a band is normally recognized.

There are five performers, yet the record contains almost no star position. There are guitars and saxophones, yet melody rarely governs. There are drums, but no single meter can reliably explain what the drums are doing. The music is live and physical, yet it often resembles the impossible cleanliness of computer sequencing. Every familiar category remains present as a blurred silhouette.

Gokita’s return as cover artist also creates continuity with Rhythm & Sound while reflecting the band’s changes. His color work possesses a softer and more bodily atmosphere than the black-and-white visual world commonly associated with his earlier career, but the figures remain psychologically unstable. Goat has undergone a comparable expansion. The earlier rhythmic severity survives, now surrounded by metallic color, flute breath, unstable drum pitch and greater spatial depth.

The faint handwritten title is a particularly beautiful decision. “Joy in fear” is not announced like a slogan. It must be found inside the dark shape. Hino arrived at the phrase after enduring lineup uncertainty, pressure to advance beyond the earlier records, enormous rehearsal demands and difficult recording sessions. He feared comparison with the first two albums, but also wanted to include that fear within the pleasure of finally completing something new.

The title therefore describes both the sound and the labor producing it. Goat’s music creates pleasure by maintaining risk. If the players could not fail, the accuracy would lose its emotional charge. A programmed sequence may be more exact, but its exactness is guaranteed before playback begins. Five musicians repeating different patterns create a future that must be successfully reached one second at a time.

This is not freedom understood as the absence of rules. Goat produces freedom through an almost absurd multiplication of rules. A short phrase, restricted set of sounds or fixed meter becomes the narrow passage through which attention must travel. Because the player cannot escape through ordinary expressive gestures, microscopic differences acquire consequence.

The discipline is punishing. Hino estimated that individual pieces could require one or two months of composing, daily demo work and rehearsal. A promising computer sketch might fail when translated to bodies, forcing the structure to be reconsidered from the beginning. By the time the music worked, he could lose the ability to judge whether it was good. Only during final mastering did the album become distant enough for him to hear it as a listener.

That exhaustion is audible without making the record sound miserable. Joy In Fear contains the exhilaration of difficult work becoming collectively possible. Every clean intersection carries weeks of confusion behind it. The performance does not display effort theatrically, but effort produces the tension inside every repetition.

This may be why the album feels so alive despite the absence of conventional emotional storytelling. There are no lyrics explaining what the musicians endured. The body supplies the account. Breath must be controlled, hands must strike and mute at exact moments, muscles must preserve a pattern while hearing several incompatible patterns around it. Fear is located in the possibility of collapse. Joy is the structure continuing.

The group’s resemblance to Autechre, Mark Fell or Ryoji Ikeda is therefore partly deceptive. Those electronic references help describe the rhythmic intricacy and apparent computational logic, but goat’s meaning changes because the machine has been distributed among people. The composition is not executed by pressing play. It must be believed into physical existence repeatedly.

The connection to Miles Davis’s On the Corner is also useful, not because goat reproduces its electric jazz language, but because both forms understand rhythm as an environment rather than accompaniment. Instrumental identity becomes secondary to placement, repetition and pressure. A saxophone can be texture, percussion or breath before it becomes a line. The groove can remain compelling even when nobody can explain where its first beat lives.

Yet goat ultimately sounds unlike its comparisons because the group has pursued a very particular contradiction for ten years: creating music that needs human beings precisely because it tries to exceed ordinary human performance. Hino’s ideal may resemble a sequencer, but the approach toward that ideal produces something a sequencer cannot provide, the suspense of watching vulnerable bodies maintain impossible agreement.

Joy In Fear is a fitting title for that suspense. Fear is not defeated before joy appears. Joy is found inside the condition that makes failure possible.

The album does not ask the listener to solve it. Counting can reveal some of its machinery, but the body may understand first. A shoulder begins moving according to one pattern while a foot follows another. The mind loses the downbeat, then discovers that losing it has become pleasurable. What initially feels like confinement opens into motion.

That is the strange generosity inside this severe music. Goat constructs an exceptionally narrow system, then demonstrates that the narrowness contains more routes than an open field. Five people repeat a handful of short phrases, and an apparently inexhaustible world begins growing between them.

The cover’s figure remains hidden inside darkness, but its orange curve now seems almost capable of smiling. Fear has not disappeared. The musicians are still counting, listening and waiting for the next intersection to arrive. The joy is that it does.