As we move through time, our old memories decay into nothingness, warped and overrun, buried beneath the mangled undergrowth. There is constant beauty in front of us, but can we see it when the picture glitches with each little sputter in the ever-developing composition?
Shuta Hasunuma’s “454,” the first track on his forthcoming Oa, explores this question in an attempt to figure out what comes next. Out September 27, Oa is his transience record, recorded as he left New York for Tokyo and faced real producer’s block for the first time in his life. Who was he as an artist in his new home? What could he compose to capture the painstaking realities of his existence? This sense of struggle against the fabric of reality is imminently clear from the first somber tones of “454’s” composition. For Hasunuma, home has lost its stability, not only in the narrow sense, but also as a concept. On a grand timeline, he seems to ask: what even is the meaning of an “address”? We are beings with no fixed place, no fixed identity, no fixed self. So how are we to interpret the present viewed from a false center?
“454” is accompanied by a beautifully tense black-and-white video exploring these concepts through the particular lens of one very glitchy relationship. Near its conclusion, as the old (unfaithful?) lover walks off screen, Hasunuma’s melody shifts from async-style melancholy to a hint for the first time at something sweet. The effect is jarring. Can a facsimile so quickly erase the past? Who cleans up the pieces that fall behind? What is left in the space we once called home when we leave the frame?
Oa is out tomorrow, September 27, on Northern Spy Records. Watch the video for “454” below, and pre-order the album here.
More about: Shuta Hasunuma
