Hatis Noit - Illogical Dance

A Closer Listen

Hatis Noit may seem like a new artist, but she’s not; Illogical Dance is giving her a global boost.  The artist first became known as a member of Mutyumu, and her solo debut Universal Quiet made a splash in Japan in 2014.  While the EP’s initial release in 2015 should have made her a public name, it remained an eastern secret.  Add a new cover and a striking video, and the results should be completely different.

While Hatis Noit explores the outer possibilities of the human voice, she concentrates on magical and lovely tones, avoiding the ugly or off-putting.  She whispers, but never screams; soars, but never wails.  If our ears could open in wonder, they would.  Her sonic precision is extended to the stereo mix; her use of channels is exquisite, creating an illusion of surround sound.

The artist is often described as “enigmatic,” thanks to a visual identity that experiments with gender expectations and a sound that borrows from ballet, theatre and world music.  Segments of “Illogical Lullaby” find antecedent in Dead Can Dance’s “The Host of Seraphim.”  The name Hatis Noit refers to the stem of the lotus, and as “The Lotus Eaters” was Dead Can Dance’s last recording before their first split, it’s easy to make the comparison.  Katie Gately is another relative, due in this instance not to the voice but to the approach of looping and layering.  Yet while the artist is not afraid to emulate, she follows her own path, folding in so many influences that she creates her own distinctive recipe.

While the lyrics are not in English ~ they in fact seem like a made-up language of onomatopoeic chant ~ the opening syllables of the album are phonetically similar to “crystalline,” which just happens to be the name of a track by Björk, another artist to whom the artist is compared.  And while her voice can be as low as that of a Tibetan throat singer or as high as that of an operatic diva, “crystalline” is a perfect description.  Is it any coincidence that Björk collaborators Matmos remixed “Illogical Lullaby” for this release?  The duo’s participation nudges this sound from experimental to electronic.  Astoundingly, the center of the original version sounds like an electronic production, awash in stutters, trills and spliced tones; but it’s all voice.  The biggest compliment to Hatis Noit is that she didn’t need to be remixed; the biggest compliment to Matmos is that their version is a worthy addition to the artist’s oeuvre.  (Note: as I typed “oeuvre,” my computer kept changing it to “Louvre” ~ and why not?)  After a crash of thunder, director Yoshiko Akita shows the artist singing in color.  Our perception has been altered.  (Richard Allen)

Available here

Thu Mar 22 00:01:59 GMT 2018

Drowned In Sound 70

In Japanese folklore, the concept of the hatis noit relates to the stem of a lotus flower. While the flower of the lotus itself represents the living world, its roots come to symbolise the spirit realm. The stem comes to sit somewhere in the spectral realm between the two, so naturally it is here where Japanese vocal performer Hatis Noit positions her own music.

On her new EP Illogical Dance, she combines a huge range of styles from Japanese classical music and Gregorian chanting to opera, with a few pop conventions in the mix. The result is a collection that’s almost mystical in its genre-fluid design, though the almost spiritual nature of her work has trickled through from her youth. Hailing from Shiretoko – a small town in Hokkaido – Hatis Noit adopted singing as a calling during a trek to Buddha’s birthplace in Nepal when she was 16. There, she investigated a female monk singing Buddhist chants alone, awakening her to the raw power of the human voice.

As such, there are no samples to be found throughout the entirety of Illogical Dance’s three main tracks. It’s built entirely on vocal performance without words; even what sounds like the crunching of leaves beneath a person’s feet came from Hatis Noit’s own vocal chords. She instead connects the primordial and the technological in other, intuitive ways, building a musical language all its own. Ten-minute opener ‘Angelus Novus’ strings together sweepingly grand, operatic passages with more visceral and hypnotic chanting and whispered murmurs; they combine together in distinctively rhythmic and propulsive ways.

The collection is probably at its most astonishing on ‘Anagram c.i.y.’ where it’s sometimes difficult to believe that the clipped 'beats' and melodies aren’t made with sequencers and synthesisers. Yes, the vocal loops are stunted and manipulated to do Hatis Noit’s bidding, but there’s still something spellbinding about how she creates a dynamic intersection between the organic and the technological. It is the distillation of the nexus point between the netherworld and the corporeal that her name references.

‘Illogical Lullaby’ sits somewhere between both of these two tracks, again combining more stately and opulent vocals with patterns that are more childlike and innocent. It’s this track that experimental duo Matmos chose to create their own edit of (a deeply unsurprising move considering their previous collaborations with Björk, including on her 2004 album Medúlla, the almost entirely a capella nature of which Illogical Dance most closely resembles). It closes the collection, adding a number of new sounds into the mix from the muted sound of drizzling rain to clattering percussion and even some 16-bit punctuations. They turn what was originally marked as a lullaby into more of a fever dream, at times almost seeming eerily nightmarish. It’s a version that’s certainly not without charm and unpredictable intrigue, but sitting at the end of such an imperious collection, it does detract from Hatis Noit’s overall intent.

The magic in Illogical Dance lies squarely in the human voice itself; Hatis Noit bends her vocals into so many shapes that other instruments simply seem redundant. It doesn’t require any additional embellishment, finding a particularly sweet spot between fragility and raw power that’s constantly shape-shifting and presenting the listener with new ideas.


Wed Mar 21 16:06:59 GMT 2018