Chaotech Odd Echo is chaotic, technical, odd and occasionally echoey, but overall it's just plain frightening. The mysterious Kiyo (Kiyoshi Ono) apparently sent a sample of his insanely accomplished, entirely unexpected IDM to the micro splice-heads at Schematic in Miami, accompanied only by the words "enjoy warm noise from Japan". Chaotech... was the result. Already Kiyo has thrown himself into the programming vanguard with hardcore-digital luminaries Autechre, giving something like the Booth-Brown duo's LP5 a run for its money in terms of slicing detail and cerebral density, all while losing a few beats and luring unsuspecting headphone-addicts into its fractured, shimmering soundscapes with an actual melody or two.
The combination is at turns stomach-churning, head-spinning and wince-inducingly beautiful -- often all at once. After piling on layer after granular layer of melted semi-melody, "Sunset Vibe", one of a handful of near-beatless, heavily ambient cuts, collapses under its own signal-to-noise ratio and implodes, shooting out hooks right and left amid the debris. "Glow" slouches along to a plastic hip-hop beat while what sounds like mutated dolphin cries and docking rowboats collide above the mix. Halfway through the track, the beat cuts out, then winds its way back again, then cuts out, then comes back; dolphin cries become digital ping-pong balls in a woozy jam session, and the results come off like Boards of Canada after a few pints at their local pub. "On a Place" sounds like the morning after -- contemplative, somber and a bit dizzy -- with the razor-sharp inclusion of headachy, virtuosic DSP in every break.
Kiyo feels as comfortable with Mouse on Mars bloopiness (opener "Noor") as he does with Aphex-damaged modem chatter ("Way Out") as he does with dubby grooves ("Alang") as he does with glitch freak-outs ("Scope") as he does with beautifully melodic, Endless Summer-like soundscapes ("Flow") -- but despite the obvious comparisons with his European peers, Kiyo mixes and matches past recognition and gives the fractured results enough of a personal touch to defy comparisons, creating a sound that's at once mind-bending and distinctly human. If you've been suffering from IDM withdrawal ever since your favorite act released their last great album back in the '90s, give Chaotech Odd Echo a chance -- there's something incredible here for everyone.
-- Matt Pierce
Perhaps the style of melodic IDM has been a bit over-hyped in the past few years, with new artists cropping up constantly, and group-of-the-moment status being bestowed on pretty but slight outfits like Mum, but the fact remains that when done right, this type of music can be immensely rewarding. Simply put, Kiyo does it right. This young electronic musician from Japan has dubbed his own style “warm noise” (a far better descriptor than melodic IDM, anyway) and the phrase holds true for the entire hour of his debut, Chaotech Odd Echo.
It’s hard to pinpoint, in concrete terms, exactly what sets this record apart from the legions of admittedly very similar albums floating around out there. There’s a definite emotionality to Kiyo’s work, a rich depth of feeling embedded in his soaring melodies and the dense spider webs of clicking, twitching sound with which he surrounds them. On “Flow,” just one of many highlights to be found here, he backdrops the song with a constant melodic drone, adding layers of glitchy patterns, percussion, glimmering synths, and what could be a vocal sample (or a synth distorted to sound like one) on top of this static foundation. The effect is nearly overwhelming in its emotional beauty, especially as the song builds to its sweeping closure, with a half-heard voice cooing from behind the dense wall of sound. There’s warmth and compassion in this music to be sure, a blessed lack of the distance and coldness that too often characterizes electronics.
Kiyo’s sonic palette is superficially reminiscent of Oval’s, inhabiting the same uneasy territory between gorgeous melodicism and noise, but Kiyo’s music is much more unabashedly accessible, keeping the intrusion of noise and glitch minimal. The epic “Read Me” is again built on a strong melodic base, foregrounding the clicks, pops, and Aphex-like drum smears that form the track’s rhythms. The opener “Noor” is another excellent integration of glitchy quirks with Kiyo’s underlying knack for achingly sad melodies. Shards of static and broken-off melodic fragments form a crackling, constantly alive surface as multiple layers of melody slowly combine and mutate underneath. Everything is continually shedding its skins, revealing new insides, melodies cracking open under the scalpel-like incisions of Kiyo’s crispy rhythms. This is totally enveloping, beautiful beyond belief, and what it may lack in originality is more than made up for by the fact that it completely trumps nearly every one of its predecessors in this style.
Reviewed by: Ed Howard
"...As time stretches, beats begin to collate, and those warm digital crumbs start to fall off the table. This is the sound of Chaotech Odd Echo..."
Almost chaotic in nature, but firmly routed in micro-textures, this debut release by Japan based Kiyoshi Ono shows some interesting characteristics. With a compilation appearance on Schematic's recently released Well-Suited For General-Purpose Audio Work, as well as a track on Merck Records, Kiyo's debut full-length cuts a path into the obscure vortex of crunchy electronic ambience. Seemingly out of no where Kiyo dropped this musical package on the doorsteps of the Schematic Music Company with a note reading, "Enjoy warm noise from Japan." Certainly an understatement there. The ambient washes featured on this disc are treated with careful downbeat rhythms and often colored by thoughtful yet tangled tweaks.
If you can imagine the intersection between Arovane, Delarosa & Asora and Nacht Plank where an aural representation of structured glitch is the key element behind each musical piece, then you have an idea of what to expect on this circular cosmic disc. As the title suggests, Chaotech Odd Echo is just that --A mixture of odd chaotic echo's that will certainly have people scratching their ears.
Pietro Da Sacco
A more suitable title for this debut double-LP of fissured bytes is hard to conjure up. Perhaps its author thinks the same, considering he did not even bother naming its twelve tracks, each a variation of an electric hailstorm enshrouded in ceaseless static.
Unsurprisingly glitch-y considering its Japanese origin, Chaotech Odd Echo is nonetheless an appreciated addition to the ever-dilating galaxy of powerbook abstractionists. Kiyo's anti-minimalist cacophony is built not from mere clicks but full slices of cracked codes and bit-crushed etherea. Integrating Marcus Popp's overdriven Oval disks with icy beats and blotted pixels, Kiyo may come closest to updating the Orb's stoned Space Age echolalia than any of the post-IDM scramblers.
An admitted admirer of David Lynch, Kiyo's aerosol clusters of digital crackle are pliant accompaniments to that filmmaker's journeys into semi-consciousness. Relying only on the noises his software can produce, Kiyo's ambience refers back only to his LCD screen rather than the whirring world of found sound. Nonetheless, his composition are full and flush with kinetic irregularity. For fans of such bonafide experimentalists as Fennesz and Ehlers, Chaotech Odd Echo will be a palatable confection between complex flavors. For the rest, it is a well-measured sampler of the stranger shapes electronic music may take -- with a slight candy coating, that is.
Bernardo Rondeau
Strange and soft landscapes of sound with melodies far off in the distance fill Chaotech Odd Echo, the first full length album from Kiyoshi Ono's Kiyo project. The album originally arrived at record company Schematic's doorstep with a note, "enjoy warm noise from Japan." Kiyo keeps everything under a fair amount of control, never letting rhythms get too chaotic, and picking his glitch from the lighter side of his computer. There's enough substance to his composition that listeners will get as much out of its 60 minutes as they want. No tunes to hum, but it could work as background music for entering a meditative state or pushing code at the office. A strange combination of noisy and delicate, Chaotech Odd Echo brings the Oval set their first great chillout album.
Described by the artist as “warm noise from Japan,” this LP is actually slightly melodic. “Scope,” for example, features soft notes among its burbles and beats. “Way Out” is more complex, its subtle melody nestled in crunchy beats. “On a Peice,” [sic] on the other hand, is atmospheric, with deep bass and textured sounds. The album ends with “Sunset Vibe,” a cleansing wash of noise.
While there is variety to these tracks, the album as a whole feels cohesive. Kiyo has an ear for interesting sounds, and there is a certain warmth, a nostalgia, behind his electronics. This release is like a found object—a documented journey through a sonic shadow box.
Jacob Arnold
After an initial burst of noise like the eruption of an old shipwreck from its briny prison onto the hot beach, Kiyo's debut release from Schematic settles into a looping, ambient landscape, washed by gurgling synths and tweaked by gentle bubbles of effervescent tones. Chaotech Odd Echo arrived, unannounced, at the Schematic offices with a note -- "Enjoy warm noise from Japan" -- and the restful release is an interlude from the more schizophrenic offerings of the label.
Other than a pair of songs on Schematic's Well-Suited for General-Purpose Audio Work, Kiyo is a new face on the IDM frontier and his appearance is one of those fully-formed anomalies which appear to crop up with some regularity in the electronic music field. His work is graceful and playful, filled with beats that sound like fizzy water and scratchy tones which sound like tiny pebbles against sum-warmed glass instead of the chaotic frenzy of an uncontrolled avalanche.
While "Glow" starts off with a haze of spiked static, it quickly dissolves into a wash of rich sound, a fat slow marimba song which lulls me into a gentle sleep, and it is only the space winds and ethereal flutes of the intro to "Scope" which bring me back. I return later to the three tracks which filled my nap and I find them to be the source of the rich colors and gentle tonic which suffused me during that somnamulance.
Those familiar with the Schematic sound will hear elements here -- Dino Felipe's textured experimentalism, Delarosa & Asora's sense of melody and pacing -- but the sound is layered and folded, not into intricately impossible cactus puzzles which poke and prod you as you try to touch them but pieces of haunting delicacy as if they are made from smoke and volcanic ash. They are gritty under your fingers, but they don't last as you touch them. Kiyo's Chaoetech Odd Echo is filled with the odd and the chaotic, but so pleasantly enticing that the crackle of broken beats and the chirrup of interrupted melodies seem warmly inviting. You can fall into Kiyo's work and it will won't hurt. Welcome to the softer side of fractured glitch.
-Mark Teppo
Seek solace in womblike electronics
Japanese artist Kiyo might hint at chaos in the title of his full-length debut, but the product is anything but. Calculating — though not in a robotic, mathematical sense — he injects a distinctly human quality that is often purposely absent from brainy, abstract electronic music. By infusing round edges rather than sharp angles, warmth rather than sterility, Kiyo settles into a pulsing, muted groove garnished with odd filter sweeps, diaphanous LFOs and white noise. Never deviating from its soothing theme, Chaotech reaches actualization with the intelligent slow jam “On a Place.”
— Erin Hutton
After a foray into the never-never-land of short-attention-span beat tweakery, Schematic takes a deep breath and releases this coolly exhilarating shotgun hit of an ambient album from Japan's Kiyoshi Ono (aka Kiyo). Chaotech Odd Echo sounds like a circus, or maybe a music box, heard through a sandstorm in a wind tunnel. Classic downtempo patterns break down into piles of gold dust, while flutes and burnished bell tones push back against the erosion with a cool, caressing tide. What it wants in structure it makes up for in depth — naptime listening best heard loud. (PS)
I did, however, find a lot to enjoy on Chaotech Odd Echo, the first full-length album from Japan's Kiyoshi Ono a.k.a. Kiyo. Reportedly, this disc arrived at the Schematic offices with a note that read "Enjoy warm noise from Japan," and that phrase that fits the album quite nicely. The artist's website bio reveals him to be a fan of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick, and through his juxtaposition of melodic sketches and fractured beats with layers of subtle rumbles and in-and-out waves of crackling static, he manages to evoke a sense of unease and edginess in his music that is similar to that found in those director's films. There are a couple moments where things threaten to get a little too flighty and abstract, but Kiyo has a good handle on how to keep the listener's attention by balancing those non-linear impulses with warm harmonics and clank-and-crunch rhythms. - Greg Clow
Chaotech Odd Echo is the work of Japanese artist Kiyoshi Ono, who somehow manages to make experimental electronic music that is both soothing and chaotic. Slow-tempo beats and melodies are the background, while clipped sounds and fragments of noise jump in and out of focus. (AL)
"A package arrived at the doorstep bearing the message 'Enjoy warm noise from Japan'. Contained within was the music of the newest addition to the Schematic family. Kiyo has arrived fully formed, after only one compilation track on Miami's Merck Records and two compilation tracks on Schematic's Well-Suited for General-Purpose Audio Work. Hailing from Japan, Kiyo is one Kiyoshi Ono and his debut album, Chaotech Odd Echo is a peaceful foray into the same territory as Schematic's celebrated Lilly Of the Valley, modernized with the same precision and angle that the label flaunts today. Chaotech is rare in that it achieves tranquility without the use of the somber and sedentary. Straddling the region between Takeshi Muto's rhythm experimentation, Delarosa & Asora's melodicism, and Dino Felipe's gritty interference, Chaotech Odd Echo will be a welcome addition to the collections of fans of the former, who are looking for a few more melodies, and for those who have been sidetracked by Schematic's recent venture into music for the severely distracted."