MUSIC REVIEWS

CHARI CHARI
Spring to Summer
(File Records)

Chari Chari entered my vocabulary in August. That was the month I met Rie, a 21-year-old music writer in Tokyo. One of her gigs is as an editor for a music industry magazine, for which she listens to umpteen million advance tapes and CDs each month and writes reviews of her favorites. Rie knows a helluva lot about music. It's her life. Like the Tower Records' slogan: No music, no life. That's Rie.

So I asked Rie what sounds were really getting her socks off these days. She said "Chari Chari - you HAVE to listen to Chari Chari - Zettai! Absolutely!" In fact, after I popped that question, Chari Chari was all Rie could talk about. She recommended I pick up a copy of the CD pronto. I did and wasn't disappointed.

So who is Chari Chari? Imagine if a sampler could travel to the jungles of Southeast Asia, visit a Japanese shrine on New year's Day, and wallow in the religious music of Borneo.

"Spring to Summer" is that sampler as a musical postcard sent along a chain of destinations around the world, picking up bits of local sounds along the way and fusing them with all the other sounds that have come before.

This postcard bears the sonic stamps and postmarks of Brazil, Bali, West Africa and East Asia, plus the digital fingerprints of Europe and Japan.

The postcard gets carried around Tokyo in a DJ bag where, by some mystery of "X-Files" science, it's fused further with the contents of the records: techno, minimal, house. Before arriving in your letterbox, it gets passed around a jazz club and witnesses a salsa lesson. That's Spring to Summer.

If you're in the record business, you might describe Chari Chari in simple terms that'll steer the masses, cash in hand, to the right record store bin so they'll easily find your product and - with the help of the A&R Man's god - buy it. A&R people might say Chari Chari is World Music and Techno mixed together. But that wouldn't do Spring to Summer justice. It's more than that.

It's a sophisticated collection rooted in deep, meditative textures and serene organic samples: the sounds of insects, birds, rainforests, wind and surf. Its indigenous musical sounds are woven carefully into the fabric of electronica and jazzy grooves. It's beautiful. Almost perfect.

Chari Chari is the moniker for Tokyo-based Kaoru Inoue and his handpicked line-up of sound sculptors, musicians and percussionists. Apart from the "ethnic" organica, it's the percussion and rhythms that stand-out. And the way these work with the album's laidback keyboards and sampling makes for a well-crafted balance between digital tech and nature: Balinese bells and S3000s; Ghanaian shakers and crickets; slot drums and programming.

Originally a guitarist and club DJ, Inoue has seen it all, heard it all, played it all, and now, armed with the confidence of an artist who has found his own voice, he has arrived on a tropical Paradise Isle that's the musical equivalent of Phuket's natural landscape, minus all the crap tourists and their crap traps. -NICHOLAS BLACK

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