While it didn’t end up in my Best Albums of 2024, one of the releases that almost made it into the list was Mahōgakkō by Japanese musician Hakushi Hasegawa [長谷川白紙]. It’s an insanely, gleefully over-the-top cavalcade of pure pop extroversion, exhausting yet irresistible, mind-melting in its complete stylistic and artistic abandon. So i thought it would be interesting to take a look back and see where Hasegawa’s journey began: a short but no less arresting EP titled iPhone 6 Plus [アイフォーン・シックス・プラス], released in 2017.
The first three of its five tracks are like a jazz fusion triptych. ‘Fu Study P’ [フュー・スタディ P] gets things going in the wildest possible way, at breakneck speed, superfast but also cyclic, giving the impression that it’s whirling round and round with slight variations to its relatively slow portion of melody. A couple of reposes introduce a drum break and nicely expose the rapid bassline respectively, but the frenetic pace always returns, endlessly spiralling like a mad dog chasing its tail.
It’s followed by ‘Desert’ [砂漠で], an even more relentless track with rapid chord changes and vocals that, though they seem measured also have an unsurprisingly breathless quality to them. Here the brief repose partway through serves to set things up for the track’s blazing high point, exploding with a sharp harmonic shift. It comes out the other side unexpectedly floating over a quick pulse, but ends exactly as it began.
‘Profile S’ [横顔 S] continues at a slightly slower speed, again with fast, angular chord changes, but eases off somewhat when Hasegawa’s vocals begin, not so much by slowing down but by blurring the exact nature of the beats and pulse. Harmonically, the chord progressions are absurdly rapid, becoming deliberately oblique after the middle 8, as if almost coming off the rails.
Perhaps in an acknowledgement that you can only keep this up for so long, the final two tracks take a different tack. The 71-second ‘Soon’ [すぐ] takes the form of a bizarrely unhinged recording of harp, drums and other assorted sounds improvising loosely while being deformed and distorted in real time, with a mischievously clear cadence at the end (order emerging from chaos?). Whereas ‘ Out of the Quilt’ [綿の外は] uses the harp to provide a rapid harmonic underlay for off-kilter, wavering vocals. Lacking the overt motoric drive of the earlier songs, it brings iPhone 6 Plus to a queasily sweet, decidedly askew conclusion.
Released by the Japanese netlabel Maltine Records, iPhone 6 Plus is available as a free download from their website.
