Among the Rikyu Dōka there is a verse: "Though you keep the form and then break it, though you leave it behind, never forget the root." This is said to be the origin of shu-ha-ri — keeping, breaking, and departing from the form. To break a form you must first keep it; without a form, there is no form at all, only formlessness. Having no formal training in music theory, I searched for what could be called the form of programmed music made at home — i.e., house — and arrived at Larry Heard's Can You Feel It, the first post-MIDI programmed house record to introduce voicings and to make rhythm, harmony, and melody resonate abstractly with one another. I built this work on that foundation, following its degree notes and its methodology. And on the verses I was joined by Hibahihi (Demi), who back in the day roamed New York night after night from the hip hop scene to the house scene alongside Susie, then Kenny Dope's manager — bringing that lived, on-the-ground feel and toasting it onto a production that is otherwise nothing but hindsight. I also treated the oscillation of a synthesizer left running with the arpeggiator stopped as a drone, balancing it against the composed portions, and by breaking the arpeggios down note by note I attempted an arrangement in which the non-musical and musical parts of the track hold each other in tension.
The act of keeping a form can at times become excessively obsessive — as when Shikō Munakata, who once declared "I will become van Gogh" and threw himself into woodblock printing with van Gogh as his form, traveled to Europe in 1959 and took rubbings of the van Gogh brothers' gravestones using his wife Chiyako's cosmetics. To relativize that unknowable devotion to form, and to counter a working process prone to wallowing in the self-satisfaction of having kept the form, I asked Secret Circuit (Eddie Ruscha V), who achieved his own in-house Italo disco on the West Coast in San Francisco, to lightly toast a verse that could be read as either talking blues or poetry reading — and so the record was completed in a way unbound by form. Apologies for the rambling text.
December 2025, respectfully, Nozaki