If you're unfamiliar with his previous work, Yoshi Wada will climb right past your Rising Stars list into  "Dudes that have killed it for centuries,"alongside Terry Riley and John Cage, who oddly enough were all part of the Fluxus movement which dealt with outsider music and art in the 1960's. Those familiar with Wada can expect the same level of depth and vigor found in this year's similarly unearthed drone piece Lament For the Rise and Fall of Elephantine Crocodile which focuses on vocal drone rather than the anthemic shrills found on The Appointed Cloud. And while these two releases are bookends to different styles of a genre, The Appointed Cloud proves more accessible to a severely underrated artist.   

Wada comes from a simpler time: new and fresh and clear as the shrill bagpipes that open the 1987 recording. The primal work undermines any naysayer of avant-garde or drone music; Wada concocted this before the haters were even born, sperm even. And current or no, relevant in the grand scheme of whatever conjured musical canon, the hand-crafted pipe organ and enormous hanging sheet metal still hit like a ton of bricks. I can't imagine witnessing this live, I get angina simply listening to the recording.  With his swirling tension and pealing bass, Wada might as well be another Noriega motivating a crack epidemic, fiends clawing for yellow-tops of drone when in actuality he fell into sidewalk gaps and off the map for twenty years. 

Rather than tension-and-release we have tense and waiting for pregnancy test results, the banging sheet metal tremors constantly moving underfoot. As soon as the neophyte jitters start to wear off from the first bagpipe cacophony at five minutes, the effect multiplies and stacks into feverish pipes gasping for air and speaking in tongues, then suddenly it cuts off into somber drone while you're left staring out your window wondering if everything is cool outside.  But there's no outside, no containment, just an open space with Wada in the center holding mechanical bagpipe notes that would make Kenny G's lungs explode. Vastly simplifying the piece, a series of quiet bass rumblings and sharp pipe shrieks intermingle, and as the performance hits the forty-five minute mark the notes turn pyretic and it's like that moment before death when brain synapses shoot off endorphins into a hyper-realized state, consciousness without self, and Wada is fighting off the witching hour on borrowed time as the Grim Reaper taps his wristwatch and a gong sounds off towards midnight.

The term drone almost trivializes The Appointed Cloud, which focuses on movement and fluidity rather than just repeated tones. The meditation encourages close listens to subtle intricacies, but the grand scheme right on the cusp of  cultural and historical change makes it hard to view Cloud as just a hectic series of bangs and yelps. Yet with a hydra-headed depth it's easy to appreciate the recording and the ability to garner value in multiple instances: the build-up simulating creation or a samurai ethic mentality of meditation while gearing for war, the crescendo of pipes and the explosion of battle, every trite metaphor to place value on harmonies and cacophonies expounded innumerable times and turned into self-parodies. Yoshi Wada is an entertainer and he's creating this brief window just for you and your id.  And with all the negative dirt flung around and notions of pretense and counter-pretense, it's nice to have a simple escape. 

If I was the type of guy to believe in musical value past momentary state increase, I'd say The Appointed Cloud offers sublime ego-loss and almost a metaphysical journey into meditative drone and tonal frequencies. But I'll be easy: fans dig it, others remain ambivalent. Hell, it's almost like Wada realized something so powerful couldn't exist, a swan-song of a predicted future that shifts in tone mid-song. The contrast of the first and last bagpipe blast is staggering: the former still wet behind the ears, rosy cheeked and clear-eyed with the latter a haggard straw-haired loon that has seen some shit, maaaan. It must be dire times indeed when something so heavy rears its head after twenty years. A crucial cut of music birthed once a generation. 

-James Anaipakos