Uzumaki

by Stewart MasonFollowing up on the mash-up exercise Combat, laptop wizard Mochipet takes a different thematic tack on Uzumaki. Many of these tracks, in keeping with both the album title and David Y. Wang's own cultural background, incorporate an Asian influence, whether in the Japanese spoken word samples that underpin the brief title track or the taiko drumming, gamelan-like percussion and tolling prayer bells that crop up throughout the rest of the disc. When combined with Mochipet's trademark deep bass and skittering, glitchy beats, the comparatively tranquil source material creates a delicate tension maintained through the first two-thirds of the album. The last third, consisting of two guest remixes of earlier Mochipet tracks and Yang's own remix of Codec's "ISM," doesn't fit either in sound or theme with the rest of the album, making it a jarring and somewhat frustrating conclusion to an otherwise beautifully arranged, well-sequenced album. To be fair, however, the three tracks are enjoyable on their own merits, particularly Otto Von Schirach's startlingly ADD-like reworking of Mochipet's cracked cross-genre exercise "Polka Electronic Death Country."