BRIEF DESCRIPTION: Hula Hooper is a collective formed in August of 2007 and composed by Takeyuki Hakozaki on the instruments and electronics and by Naomile on the vocals and electronics. Naomile is well known in Japan for singing covers in a similar fashion to Nouvelle Vague (eg. The Clash’s “I fought the law”). The band considers impressionism to be an important influence on their music, and that becomes clear instantly on Toushi Zuhou EP because of their rehash of several musical genres.
The fist song is “Light”, and to honour the name, it grows languidly as if it was the light of a splendorous day breaking through the darkness of a disturbed night of sleep, by means of a happy morning gesture like opening the drapes, letting the sun invade the skin, and quietly observing its course on a lonely balcony of the city.
The second song “Session 0” pushes us somewhat suddenly back into the world of dreams through the sweetness of a phantasmagorical impulse, while imprisoning us in a limbo somewhere between consciousness and sleepiness,
“Session 1” is the third song in which the trail of commotion fades, and imperceptibly a hypnotic crescendo arises and takes over the body, throwing it on a sensual moment of lostness by the shore of a mysterious and enigmatic land, in a absolute surrender to the voyage.
The fourth song: “Session 2” encloses us inside the surroundings of deep sleep, melting us completely with Hula Hooper’s cosmos. Right before we settle in just one place, we discover that we are already floating through the last song, “Session 3”, which is something like the final whisper the moment before leaving a place we know we’ll never be able to taste the same way twice.
Voice guides us along this strange journey entitled Toushi Zuhou, and if sometimes we are lifted along with it and the instruments, other times we are ripped apart, suffering the pain and the indecision of separation. Hula Hooper’s music isn’t simply heard, but most of all assimilated in a remote part of the brain, and like a psychotropic it induces a warm uterus like hallucination.
The melodies are subtle and ease through under the skin, in such a way that they become impossible to reproduce or describe, but simply easy to taste and miss.
- Hugo Filipe Lopes
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