[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Syzygys: “Rimsky Train”
From the album The Complete Studio Recordings (2003)
“A female duo who plays microtonal pop music,” the Japanese band Syzygys is the project of Hitomi Shimizu (keyboards) and Hiromi Nishida (violin). (The band’s name, presumably an alternative plural of the polysemic word “syzygy,” comes from a Greek root meaning “conjunction.”)
Like all good music, that of Syzygys defies description: it is at once familiar and strange. Many of the gestures are redolent of that ubiquitous but unnameable modern idiom of composition heard in incidental music for popular media, but a subversive and experimental element is also always present— and in this way the music of Syzygys is comparable to the otherwise very different work of, say, Raymond Scott.
The delightful weirdness of this music derives in part from the completely ingenuous fusion of catchy pop song elements with the hauntingly unfamiliar sonorities of a 43-note just intonation scale invented by Harry Partch. Shizimu plays a modified electric reed organ tuned this scale. (Across the top of the band’s homepage there is a “playable” 43-note keyboard. A classy touch.)
If this music sounds like the somewhat deranged soundtrack of a forgotten Nintendo game, it’s not coincidental: Shimizu has done the music for several titles for the Sony PlayStation. She’s also a prolific composer for film and TV.

Played 80 time(s).
August 19, 2010, 12:01am











