Japanese outfit Dowser began as a 4-piece. In 1991, their debut release was the soundtrack for the cult cyberpunk horror flick “964 Pinocchio”. Founding member Hiroyuki Nagashima is now a professor at Tokyo University’s Graduate School of Film & New Media, where he teaches sound design. Together with fellow founder, Masateru Terai, and new member visual artist, Takashi Miyagawa, Nagashima has recorded a fresh Dowser set for local label All Horned Animals. The album, entitled “Schema 1+2”, consists of a couple of 40 minute-long cosmic collages, constructed with a combination of vintage  modular – EMS and Buchla – and virtual gear. Psychedelic journeys through juxtaposed sonics. These pieces are most definitely trips.

“Schema 1” moves from morphing, whistling drones, strange, alien squeaking. Machines blinking and bleeping, like robotic wildlife. Its details increasing in frequency and intensity, against a constantly shape-shifting backdrop of cut-up horns, bells and blasts of psyche rock. Evolving from abstract ambience to free-jazz freak outs. Crazy, galloping cartoonish sections set in stark contrast with quieter, more conventional corners of trumpet and piano. The air of these fizzing, slithering improvisations is sort of mystical, and despite sometimes being abrasive, somehow melodic and meditative. Unique and uncompromising, but drawing the listener in.

“Schema 2” opens with field recordings of flowing water, scrambled voices and percussive clanking. Blocks of static, white noise and feedback. Circuitry chirrups, loudly, like metallic cicadas, as if the programming were plotting a course up river, into deep jungle. Travelling through storms of mad, manic sound effects. A heavy, roots bass-line guiding, grounding the track’s progress. Anchoring the proceedings somewhere more readily accessible than its predecessor. 

There are segments of tribal percussion, cinematic synths, that range from Sci-Fi to funky giallo, and ringing, ragged electric strumming. Voices are found, repurposed from fuzzy shortwave radio transmissions. The music switching between lighter and weightier. Descending into distorted, industrial dub, and emerging out the other side as ambient echoing and then beatific blues-y fretwork and arty sax solos, before suddenly jumping, totally surprisingly, into jazzy, breezy French chanson-esque pop. The experimental expedition finally ending with crashing, classical keys and distant laughter. 35 years on from Dowser’s debut, the project still knows how to provide a wild ride. 

Dowser’s Schema 1 & 2 can be ordered directly from All Horned Animals.