Super review by Cal Gibson, of The Secret Soul Society.

“Inaudible Works”, in which the everlasting imponderable ‘what does it mean to be alive?’ is chewed over in a pleasingly assorted number of ways by Osaka-born Hyu, an artist who previously released two albums of ‘wiggly and wriggly robo-pop’ on Nobukazu Takemura’s Childisc imprint at around the end of the previous century.

Inaudible works, silent activity, playful pokes and ontological swamps of human perception: everything’s on the menu, nothing’s out of bounds tonight, Matthew. Music that thwacks hard, tweaked and twonked. Cutie Bamboo Dance, for example, is all Little League baseball and stray thoughts late at night: a wandering, wonderful concoction. Lounge music gone awol, alien and unafraid.

WigWig re-arranges the garden furniture: cartoon breaks and cavernous bass hollows given a distorted riff to run around until the chaos comes to a complete halt. Aphex via Bagpuss, possibly. Lo-fi and full of non-sequiturs. Puppy-ish, almost to the point of absurdity. Un-furrow those brows music lover – Hyu’s got a lovely sense of deranged humour.

Grid Bug Invention is a paean to the perverse gods of the dance, a snickering, snookering deflowerment of all the sacred rave tropes. It’s ludicrous and yet affecting, built to befuddle at twenty paces. It’s a jam, if jam means something that you’d have a hard time convincing people to dance to. Three minutes in it all falls apart completely: it’s waving goodbye and hailing a passing truck, essentially.

So it’s electronica then, but of a kind that Mike Paradinas would enjoy: electronica that’s naked and unashamed, revelling in its own stoopidity. Weirdly life-affirming in taking you back to those years when something actually seemed to matter. Odoremi is particularly gauche: this is nostalgia for drooling, blithering old age: remember when all this was nightclubs sonny?

Its curious, mutilated dance music for curious mutilated (end)times. A niche market, no doubt, but there’s a whole otherworldliness to Hyu’s vision that somehow rings very true. Whimsy and strangeness and industrial quantities of potential damage: Inaudible works is a whole heap of fun, fun, fun. You remember fun, right? Party tunes for the afterlife.

Hyu`s Inaudible Works 1994 – 2008 is out now on EM Records.