I had never heard of any of the performers, the label or the project whatsoever. But I’m very pleasantly surprised once again from a musical perspective. The musicians and label all come from Italy, and the label is a DIY label that started in 1989, but it’s been silent for approximately between 1994 and 2016. The label is probably the brainchild of Mario Cardinale, or at least, that’s how I interpret the scarce information I can find. The Sokushinbutsu Project is a four people band with members Andrea Dicò on drums and percussion, Marco Casiraghi doing some weird Korean zither named the ajaeng, Enrico Ponzoni handling synths and a baritone guitar and Massimo Mascheroni who is running the synthesizers, samplers in a more general as well as droney way.
Conceptually, ‘The Yōkai Codex’ is about Japanese spiritualism. The original meaning of yōkai conveys a sense of mystery combined with fear, something that both attracts and terrifies and applies to everything that goes beyond the normality of events and enters the kingdom of the strange, the wonderful, the mysterious, the miraculous. According to the project, this musically translates into a mixture of massive noise layers of the drony kind, non-Western sounding rhythms, the before mentioned use of the ajaeng, but most importantly, the emotion concerning the tension between attraction and repulsion. The in-your-face “Winds”, the more luscious “Water”, the heavily guitar-driven “Countryside”, the somewhat erratic “Village and City”, “Home” with its slow pulsating rhythm and significant role for the ajaeng and finally “Epilogue: Yōkai Street” which is fully percussion driven for a haunting effect.
My personal favourite is “Water”, but this is an album that will not directly show all of its beauty. It will probably show more of its hidden structures when you play it in different settings, different locations and on different systems. You’ll have to peel the layers like an onion to get to the core. But that is probably also one of the results of it being a four-people project; There is so much being said at the same moment.
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