[SOLD OUT] Banetoriko "Kata No Wadachi" LP

Kata No Wadachi is the latest album by Banetoriko, the solo noise project of Tamaki Ueda. Her
first release both on An’archives and on vinyl, it follows several albums for the Neurec imprint –
2017’s Beside the Sluice and 2022’s Yorioto Hogiokuri – and several other cassettes and CD-Rs.
With Kata No Wadachi, the Banetoriko world, inspired by the Yokai (“strange apparitions” –
supernatural figures, ghosts, spirits) of Japanese folklore, is at its most resonant yet.
Recorded across 2022 and 2023, the three tracks on Kata No Wadachi have Ueda performing in a
particularly elevated manner. Her sound is highly tactile and grittily sensuous, the better to capture
the ritualistic repetitions, and hypnotic methodologies, core to Banetoriko. The scrape and scratch
of Ueda’s self-made metal instrument, the Banetek, gives these improvisations a unique throb,
even as their mood, of introverted focus and elaboration of minutiae, gestures towards broader
histories of noise and abstract art. Kata No Wadachi evokes, to some degree, the urban ritual
noise of the likes of The New Blockaders, Organum, or Ferial Confine; elsewhere, the abraded,
rough-housing textures bring to mind the eighties tape works of Hands To and John Hudak.
Ueda embraces the dream evocation that’s possible when loops of blurred texture collide with the
gnaw and groan of energised metal, while mantric, dissociated vocals, and the oppressive weight
of deep breath, gather around these compositions like a ghost’s shroud. While she’s been making
noise for some time, since the nineties, Banetoriko was formalised as a project in 2011, while
Ueda lived in Los Angeles. Relocating to Osaka in 2021, she’s carved out an utterly unique space
for herself in Japanese noise, and her music contains an absolutely elemental vibration. Framed
beautifully with poetic liner notes by Aurélien Rossanino, Kata No Wadachi is an oppressive, yet
quixotically blissful trip.