Foodman is Takahide Higuchi, from Nagoya, in central Japan. After remixing Jessy Lanza’s ‘Alexander’ last year, ‘Yasuragi Land’ is his first release for Hyperdub, alive with Footwork-inspired musical freedom and the sense that everything is a rhythm.
Unusually, ‘Yasuragi Land’ has no bass. Instead, the album is breezy and refined; hyper-rhythmic music, made with a few simple tools, dances around your head. ‘Yasuragi’ and ‘Parking Area’ feel like gently deconstructed acoustic jazz, while ‘Ari Ari’ is deep house splattered with a cartoonish hiccup. ‘Hoshikzu Tenboudai’ and ‘Shiboritate’ bounce around the speakers like tranceinducing polyrhythmic updates of the New York minimalists, programmed past human limits.
‘Food Court’ is busy with mechanical rhythm and naive melodies, ‘Gallery Café’ pairs a cute wooden flute melody with micro edited wooden drums, ‘Michi No Eki’ is like a digital take on Magma's complex rock, and ‘Sanbashi’ indirectly approximates 80s R&B. The album ends on‘Misyuku’, with a treated guitar lick sounding like it was stolen from Daft Punk, woven into dense interlacing drums.