Make Believe Mailer 91: Metome's "HORA"

The Latest From The Osaka Producer Is A Monument To The 2010s...And More

HORA is a decade condensed in just over 100 minutes. Osaka producer Metome explores both their own personal musical explorations from the last ten-odd years, while also — intentionally or not — offering a monument to the electronic community that thrived in his hometown during that same period. Some songs amount to sketches echoing this history, others are slow-burning tributes to it.

As someone who spent a lot of time in this world directly in the early 2010s, and who kept close tabs on it even after moving to Tokyo, HORA is a fitting tribute to those times without ever feeling too dusty. The vocal sample stutters, the bass slaps, the ambient hums, the beat skitters…submerging myself in them over these 23 tracks takes me back to basement clubs in the Kansai region, but they also still feel alive when I snap out of that haze in 2023.

Turns out that spirit of experimentation was never something to be placed behind glass, and become an exhibit of time gone by.

I thought Metome had already eulogized Osaka’s 2010s electronic scene with Dialect. That 2018 album took all the familiar sounds of the period, but cast them as melancholy rather than vibrant. Sampled voices became sighs, keyboard melodies more hushed, and Metome allowing space into his songs to give them room to linger. He explored pure ambience and mood, turning dance floor jams into fading memories. Tight bass comes off a lot less playful when it’s surrounded by downtrodden singing.

It seemed like a fitting final tribute to what, was for a few years, the most exciting electronic community in all of Japan. There’s no way for me to not be biased about it, as it was also the first time I’d seen an honest-to-goodness artistic blossoming play out in front of me — I lived in Kansai then. If I explored the world of Tokyo’s CUZ ME PAIN it would be as an outsider. The parties put on by INNIT, though, were right there, whether I was an hour away by train in Mie Prefecture or a ten minute walk from my shitty apartment near Namba Station. I saw the people there outside the events, I talked to them, I even joined them for late-night drinks if I made it to the end of the party.

Metome floated in that world too. I never talked to him directly back then, though we surely intersected. He reflected what INNIT and the greater Kansai beatmaker scene was up to, as much as Seiho or Madegg or And Vice Versa. Early releases scattered on Soundcloud or collected on various EPs revolved around tightly constructed songs built from vocal ripples pulled from a wide array of sources, threaded together by piano, beats and some particularly sharp bass. That all led up to 2014’s Objet, a sliced-and-re-assembled collection showing every emotional angle of the city’s sound, from ecstatic (“Magic Cloud ‘1970s”) to intimate (“Black Black”) to straight sensual (“Take This Love” that sax!). It was, to me, a masterpiece arriving right as this whole collective seemed to be going to a new level.

It sorta did, but not in the way you’d expect. Artists in this space scattered — Seiho and Avec Avec earned bigger chances apart and together, other figures in the community moved, while others like INNIT founder And Vice Versa stayed but started producing for idols while releasing his own music. The middle-class clubs of Osaka vanished, hurt by anti-dancing laws and just general economic shifts, which lingered well after. Metome stuck around in the city and kept doing his thing, all building towards Dialect, a fitting sigh to end that time.

It takes seconds into HORA to hear Metome in a different kind of reflective mood. After guitar strums, Metome lets a beat skattle in and then a wave of horns signaling…something upbeat to start “Curly.” Then comes a familiar vocal sample sliced to perfection to form a new sonic language, and those bass slaps, so sturdy and joyful! Even as the voice warps and bends, it stays cheery and actually delivers a hook. This is how to dedicate your memorial.

Rather than a closing chapter, HORA takes a wider view of both Metome’s career and the city that shaped it. His entire sonic palette is on display, from the aforementioned rubbery joy of “Curly” and “Fire Script,” to melancholic slowburns flipping that formula around on “Sand River.” Metome also revisits the ambient passages once adding to the emotional heft of Dialect, but here via tracks like “Observation of Dragonfly” and “Ancient” they feel like just another side of him. Five years ago, these sorts of inclusions felt mournful, but on HORA they are contrasted with the full ark of Metome’s artistic existence, and simply a period to revisit and play with.¹

That they mirror the same electronic elements that were present in the Osaka community Metome came up in adds to this, at least for someone like me who can remember them so clearly. But there’s no sadness or even nostalgia around the borders here, just memories of what was and reminders of how great it was…and is. Tracks on HORA would have been tagged as “future-” something back in the day, the sort of adjective that can only age poorly when tomorrow arrives. Yet that sonic palette still works, as do all the mutations that emerged in the years after, whether coming from a place of joy or longing. I imagine the biggest drawback of HORA is the long-running playtime, but it’s the rare album where that space is needed to capture every angle of where Metome and Osaka were at — from experimental funk to ambient growls to transforming cheeseball EDM (also, a fixture of Kansai in the 2010s) into a very different animal (“Equivalent”).

What makes it all click, though, is how Metome never stopped changing. In the years since Dialect, the producer has explored new electronic textures and minimal dance sounds. Alongside familiar flourishes on HORA he’s showing off that growth too. He’s fiddling with vocal-centric samples but turning them into something bombastic (“Sample Chair”), going long when it comes to skeletal beat music (“Tico Tico”), and even getting into breaks (biggest curveball “Distant Waves,” which still works in a very classic-Metome synth wash overhead). Beyond this album, Metome continues to push themselves, most recently with fellow Osaka staple Kafuka, which sees Metome welcoming more collaboration into their musical world.

It felt like an end, but Dialect really wasn’t. Regardless of what happened to the specifics of that period of Osaka electronic music — the artists, the clubs, the record stores in Kansai helping promote them — the inspiration and ethos carries on. Look at Metome himself. Besides remaining active, Metome was pulled into Enon Kawatani’s world for a remix of an Indigo la End song, while many cite him as an influence — most jaw-dropping to me, especially since I got him to say it, being Daiki Tsuneta of millennium parade and King Gnu. Then there’s the younger generation of creators, making songs that don’t necessarily sound similar to this past era but carry the same spirit of “just go for it” which flowed out of Kansai and INNIT and all of these producer’s work.

HORA is a testament to all of this, but very much a living one. Get it here.

Written by Patrick St. Michel (patrickstmichel@gmail.com)
Twitter — @mbmelodies

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1. An aside that could send this down a meandering path but which I do feel…emotionally and thematically, HORA reminds me a lot of last year’s BAD Mode, an album where Utada Hikaru looked back older and wiser on the emotional turmoil of their 2010s and constructed an even-handed exploration of it all…without losing the artistic flairs that make them so special. Obviously they sound nothing alike, though I’d love to hear Utada work over something like “Ghost Of Love.”