CD REVIEW: Sawi Lieu “Pasaraya” (Constellation Tatsu)

            When “Pasaraya” begins, you can hear the ambience of noise.    The songs first hit you with this idea that conventional instruments have been replaced with beeps and boops, blips and skips and other experimental noises that can form a rhythm to ultimately form a song.

            All of the chirps and whistles remind me of music I have heard before, but not so structured.   Usually when you find these sounds on your keyboard or drum machine, you can hear them in some noise or experimental bands but they are often used much more sparingly, much more random.   But here where there would be a drum beat there is a hiss; where there would be a guitar riff there is a beeping.

            Much like 8bit music takes out a lot of the traditional instruments in lieu of a Gameboy (And yes, I did just type “in lieu” in a review of Sawi Lieu), this replaces those instruments with the… shall we say sound effects that are less heard and less used in most music.

            And then we reach a song like “Amazonas” and the music becomes so ambient, so quiet that it is almost nonexistent.   When I first started this album today my wife commented that it was too loud so I turned it down a little bit for her.  But by this track I had to turn it back up just to hear it. 

            From there, some of the more traditional electronic noises come out to craft the songs and it strikes  me that however you want to paint this picture, however you choose to view it or describe it, these songs are just plain beautiful. 

http://ctatsu.bandcamp.com/album/pasaraya