​

Japanese solo experimental-electronic musician Ueda Takayasu releases his deep, intricate debut album of cellular dissections Every Clouds Call Our Name via Phantom Limb.

Born in Hiroshima and raised partly in Germany and Austria, Ueda Takayasu writes that he spent his childhood feeling stateless, distant from his own cultural identity and curiously “un-Japanese”. Even now, in adulthood, having returned to Japan, he speaks English, German and Japanese in his home life. His emotional response to this disorientating search for meaning took two divergent paths, both crucial for very different reasons. Firstly, he began making music, as a teenager, operating with an extraordinary mandate of destructive creativity, deleting music as soon as he finished it. This means that - while Every Clouds Call Our Name - is ostensibly Takayasu’s debut album, it is in truth his debut surviving record. (He has, however, collected new works written since the completion of this album on his Bandcamp page). The rehearsal records Takayasu produced and deleted ultimately led him to the minutely controlled chaos of Every Clouds Call Our Name. A profoundly singular artistic expression, the strange expressionism of these smudged and smeared longform pieces speak very clearly of a highly skilled creator.

Also woven into the music is the second path. Sadly, Ueda suffered an acute psychiatric episode some years ago, and was left hospitalised, medicated and unable to write music. However, mercifully, the following recovery period awoke in him “a strange change in myself. Every sense of my nature had returned. I had a feeling that I could create pictures, photographs and music pretty much the way I wanted.” He tells us that “the scene in Every Clouds Call Our Name was probably the last dream I had in the hospital. In that dream, a drawing of me is floating in the sky.”