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

In these (end) times of toil and trouble, what makes a musician / producer stand out amidst the neverending sea of beats, rhyme and basslines, drops, bops and tik-tok shocks? What’s your USP, g? Your raison d’etre? What are you adding to the mountains of aural fodder through which we daily wade? How do you make your vision stand out from the vast, always expanding sea of sound that sloshes around us?

Well, if you are Jules Brennan, you take your decades of finely-honed UK jazz funk multi-instrumentalist knowhow and you settle down in Kyoto for twenty five years, raise a family and keep making music along the way: stirring into the pot the beautiful flow of the koto and shamisen which you teach yourself, and sampling obscure Japanese soundtracks to weave into your own multi-layered compositions. Do all that and watch the likes of Colin Curtis, Kev Beadle and Paul Murphy line up to acknowledge your vibe. You know you’re on the right track when those guys are checking you, right?

Mugen then is classic Jules territory: a no-holds barred east-west throwdown that is brimful of ideas, twists, turns and a hefty dose of funkology. Take Essen, for example, a wide-screen cinedelic brew of B-movie badness: kung-fu funk fried up and thrown down, darting hither and thither, keys flashing, bass bumping: a pot-pourri of super-sweet psychedelia that’s two parts Roky Erickson and a bagful of Charles Stepney, twisted up with some deep Japanese soul. It shouldn’t work, but it absolutely slays. Mo’ Wax meets Moriarty. Ace.

Benzai Tension brings the drums, son. Jules unleashes the groove and stands well back as the fireworks are flung into action. Disco octaves on the bass, sudden left turns into koto avenue, then back to the boompty boomp. It’s downright dirty, Gertie: the sound of the counter-culture revitalised, beats and breaks for breakfast. The skill level is frankly insane: these cuts take him hours and hours and hours of composition. He’s not messing around, clearly.

Astro Zen Fiesta is warm, sunny, kosmiche in outlook: again the keys flash by in search of the holy grail of musical nirvana: horns are dropped in, the vocal samples of Jules himself and his record collection neatly intermingled. A bitches brew of stitches, twitches and kitsch fixes: a four / four stomp giving the adventurous DJs the chance to drop something out of the ordinary on the dancefloor.

Full confession time: having known and worked with Jules on and off for many years I’m biased, for sure, but there’s really not many people out there producing music with this much imagination, craft, verve and sheer delight. He pours everything into these tracks, literally, and he does it with an over-arching sense of musical wit and, yes, fun. He’s totally carved out a unique space for himself in a genre he’s pretty much created himself: no-one else sounds like this. Long may his muse play on.

Jules Brennan’s Mugen can be ordered directly from Kyotone Records.