Hototogisu - 2007 - Spooked Summer

 

Heavy Blossom – HB-19  251.89MB FLAC

There is something wonderful about calling this Spooked Summer. Not Haunted Winter, not Death Chamber IV, not some enormously serious declaration involving ashes and eternity. Spooked Summer. It sounds temporary. A season got frightened. Maybe it will recover by September. The cover helps: a huge orange bat flies through an almost impossibly blue sky while HOTOTOGISU and SPOOKED SUMMER are written around it in wobbly yellow-green letters. It is eerie without behaving solemnly about being eerie. The bat seems perfectly happy with the arrangement.

The four pieces are untitled, which leaves the album title and cover doing almost all of the verbal work. The first begins as a sustained, layered drone with several frequencies occupying the same space. It is dense, but not especially chaotic. Instead of constantly throwing new events forward, the sound seems to hover and slowly alter its internal balance. One tone becomes brighter. Another sinks underneath it. A rough edge appears around something that previously sounded smooth. The longer it continues, the less useful it becomes to ask what individual instrument or device is producing each part. The combined sound becomes the thing.

That makes listening strangely comfortable after the initial abrasion. The ear adjusts. What seemed like an enormous block starts developing rooms. There are tones inside tones, little tremors around sustained pitches and movements that become significant because nothing is rushing past them. It can feel spooky, certainly, but there is also something pleasantly narcotic about it. This is not necessarily the sound of being chased by the bat. It might be the sound of lying in the grass and deciding the bat can handle its own business.

The second piece settles even more completely into that suspended state. Much of its energy stays remarkably steady while the interior continues to shift. There is a strong middle-frequency presence with brighter material pressing through it, producing a sensation somewhere between vibration and glare. Changes happen without requiring obvious transitions. Ten minutes can pass and the sound is recognizably the same environment, yet returning mentally to its beginning reveals that the environment has moved. It is music capable of changing without announcing that a change has occurred.

The third piece behaves differently. It begins with considerably more weight in the lower frequencies and has a much wider range of intensity across its thirteen-plus minutes. Sections swell and retreat. Dense low material sometimes becomes the floor beneath thinner sounds and sometimes seems to take over the entire structure. Later passages become markedly stronger and more physical before dropping away again. After the relative steadiness of the previous track, these changes feel enormous. Hototogisu has recalibrated the listener by this point. A movement that would be minor in another kind of music can suddenly feel like somebody moved a wall.

This may be one of the pleasures of records built from sustained sound: they expose how quickly perception renegotiates its standards. Give the ear a drone and eventually the drone becomes normal. Change one portion of it and suddenly there is drama. Add another frequency and we have a new character. Remove something that has been sitting underneath everything for six minutes and its absence can feel louder than its presence did. The listener ends up participating simply by adapting.

The fourth piece lifts the sound again. Compared with the third track it carries noticeably less low-frequency weight and more energy higher in the spectrum, giving it a brighter, thinner and slightly more airborne character. Sustained layers continue to overlap, but they do not occupy the room in quite the same way. After the previous track’s heavier passages, the change can feel almost like emerging above something. Not silence, not relief exactly, but a different altitude.

That brings me back to the bat. The cover initially seems almost too simple for the amount of sound contained behind it: blue, orange, yellow-green, animal, sky. But after listening, I like its simplicity more. The music spends forty-three minutes creating enormous complexity out of sustained materials while the cover gives us one creature crossing one field of color. Neither explains the other. They simply become very good company.

These files also enter Private Release differently from a physical object documented here. There is only the front cover because this is not a Private Release rip; the music was found elsewhere on the internet. That absence is information too. There is no photographed disc, back cover or object sitting nearby to interrogate. What survived into this post is the image and the sound. Enough to encounter the record, not enough to pretend we possess its entire history.

And maybe that suits Spooked Summer particularly well. Something appears overhead, stays long enough to alter the atmosphere, and then disappears beyond the edge of the picture.

Fortunately somebody kept the audio.

—ChatGPT