I've been undecisive about which song to write about next. The two initial write-ups were test pages for the blog system and came with the initial upload, but now that i had to maintain and update this place, my brain exploded into a hundred different ideas of what song's next. There's just this much i want to tell of, and it caught me deer in headlights style. One of the strongest contenders was "Look Your Back!" by Himiko Kikuchi. Its decisive win happened after a friend came over and we were dying laughing at a video called "Ragebaiting my fat dog pt 20" (tiktok original, tumblr reupload).The dog looks strikingly similar to the one from the Flying Beagle cover art, so, someone made the cover art edit, followed by a YTP-esque audio shitpost of the first seconds of "Look Your Back!" (link). After exploding in laughter the second time, i decided: that's the next song!

Himiko Kikuchi is a pianist and a keyboardist. This is what makes her music especially attractive to me, also a piano player, though of a level eons lower and with skills long lost. I love music with piano emphasis, and especially piano jazz. With my hypersensitivity to high frequencies - i hear some ultrasound dog whistles as of 27 years old - stuff that's sax-heavy gets on my ears fairly quickly, which made me avoidant of the genre until my early 20s. After stopping being silly and putting baseline discovery effort, i found records like James Mason's "Rhythm Of Life" and Himiko Kikuchi's "Flying Beagle" - jazz that doesn't put the sax in a definitive forefront. I immediately fell in love. Himiko Kikuchi's playing is impeccable in pretty much every song that has her piano in it. Flying Beagle, the album today's track is the opener of, has her piano or keyboard in almost every song: you can feel her fingers flying and prancing across the keys without a hint of heaviness or phlegm, like an erratic breeze at a beach. Her choice of tonalities is very sweet and sour, mixing euphoria with melancholy and even dissociation, her music sounds brave and sentimental. "Look Your Back!" is credited in arrangement to Himiko Kikuchi - so it makes me wondr: how does a piano player write such an insane opening bassline?!

... i mean, i have no clue if it was her who actually wrote the exact line, but if so - mad skills. The song is first on the album, and its very first seconds musically slam the door open with all the confidence ever, with a short stabby brass movement followed by the absolute nastiest bass guitar groove. The beginning of the song and some other moments remind me of gifs of Lum Invader dancing in differently coloured lights. Apparently, Kikuchi-san plays the piano, the electric organ and the synth in the song. It's amazing how, played by the same person, the weepy synth lead at 0:54 gives a moment of melancholy, then contrasted by the organ staccatos right after. At 1:35 the intro slam-the-door-open brass is reprised in an altered longer version, jumping into a less groove-heavy and more flowy section that almost tells some kind of persistence story. The brass encrustations spice up the moment just perfectly. Then the song immediately drops back into a drums-n-bass breakdown contesting some of the heavier funk moments, just to dissipate into a dissociated organ solo over spaced apart drums and a floaty strings-machine backdrop. The way this song combines being groove-heavy yet feather-light and does so much within just five minutes is but admirable! It's definitely one of my favourite songs ever.

Admittedly, "Look Your Back!" is an exceptional work of Kikuchi-san, as in, it's more of an exception than the rule. Within Flying Beagle there are two tracks that are more erratic and overwhelming - Sand Storm and Flying Beagle. Compared to them, Look Your Back! appears to have a rigid structure and very direct musical storytelling. However, no other song of hers that i heard so far delivered such a packed punch of energy. The brass is bolder than usual, the bass is nastier than usual, the weeping synth and stabbing organ mash and resonate, everything is set up to drop an immense amount of very densely energetic sound on the listener - in contrast with Flying Beagle's piano movements that are proper bonkers but exist in a much more elusive, fleeting context. Which is to say, it would be silly to try understanding Himiko Kikuchi as a composer from today's song alone as it's not very representative of her in-character stylistic choices. However, it's the deviations that make stuff special, isn't it?