Review Summary: Tentenko II: Dead Space Dictatorship
Tentenko is an ex-idol freelance artist who runs her own label and has released an extensive range of experimental pop and techno EPs. This review is part of an ongoing series dedicated to exploring her discography. For a point of reference and orientation to her discography as a whole, please see the first instalment in the series, the review for Good Bye, Good Girl.
Well, this is an experience.
Part of the attraction of combing through Tentenko’s whole body of work lay in a wry sense of awareness that a good proportion (perhaps even the majority) of her output would be somewhere off the deep end; if you’re churning through releases at her rate completely solo with minimal budget (distribution excepting) or production value, the chances are that polish and mass appeal are rarely going to be your top priority. And yet, much as I considered myself prepared for whatever this hellish experiment of production entailed,
Dokusai still came close to throwing me off in the early game.
Released March 2015 as part of the fourth instalment of Tentenko’s zine,
Dokusai is technically her first CD-R release proper. I say ‘technically’ because it’s less a collected set of tracks and more a 20 minute industrial/ambient soundscape of droning static, occasional feedback swells, minimal percussion and interjecting synths compressed and distorted to a tone that sounds uncomfortably (amazingly) close to the passing of wind. There isn’t a shred of structure or melody to be found here; where they do appear, Tentenko’s synth lines tend to repeat relentlessly until they drop out, feeling like happenstance insertions over a bleak, amorphous background rather than key points anchoring a larger composition. The piece that showcases the greatest development is probably her cover of the Lavender Town theme in track five (“Mae Nara E”), but this is mainly because its level of background noise and fastforwarded glitching increases over its two minute runtime (i.e. *it does not stay the same*). Such small moments of variation give the EP a vague shape; “Rakugaki Muyou” (Useless Graffiti), for instance, contains a bassline (and quite a good one at that!), something uncommon to the other tracks but very welcome here, while “FF” marks itself out with stabbing synth lead so fantastically grating that I can’t help but kind of love it.
In fact, there’s a surprising amount here that I
kind of love.
Dokusai is so crude and insubstantial that it wouldn’t work as anything other than a short, low-key release, as a kind of easter egg, but in this form it’s bizarrely perfect. It feels like it
should accomplish the impressive dual feat of being both supremely boring and actively unlistenable in its atonality, but it ends up containing just enough character to be oddly gratifying. The goofball rhythms that underpin the synth delivery in “FF” and the title track, the eyeball-rolling decision to divide the first four and a half minutes into two untitled tracks despite the fact that next to nothing happens in either, and the cloaking of Tentenko’s occasional vocal contributions in enough reverb to kill a horse aren’t what I would normally call *good* music, but they’re personable enough to make
Dokusai a more than tolerable listen. The best example of this is probably the title track, which sports both the EP’s melodic hook and its only beat, alternating the latter with violent punctuations of feedback as though in parody of a showdown (the feedback wins, naturally). It’s hopelessly crass but all the more fun for it.
Drawing from what I said in Part I about Tentenko’s great inexperience as a freelance musician,
Dokusai sounds like it was made by a total rookie captivated by the smallest, most banal possibilities of her production chops and recording equipment, but it’s so transparent in this scope that it comes off the better for it. This may seem a little more cynical and ironic than intended; while I do think the majority of the EP’s appeal comes from the sheer audacity of the composition and writing choices here, it doesn’t read as an accidental own-goal or a joke made by Tentenko at her own expense. Rather, it feels like an ambivalent insight granted to her core early audience (and anyone else interested) into a narrow slither of her creative process - nothing more, nothing less. I want to say it’s perhaps the ultimate gesture when it comes to shedding her idol roots, but at the same time it’s hard to shake the BiS-ism of making the first full release of your career an EP as wilfully abstruse as this. A promising start.
