Flower With No Color

Product Description
Pop rock icons Yoshimi (Boredoms) and Yuka Honda (Cibo Matto) have joined forces to bring you an unexpected ambient gem. Tribal, beautiful and classic(al) all at once, and much like the women who created it, the album is dreamy and classic. Recorded at Mt. Ikoma in Nara & at Free People Studio on Osaka over 4 inspired days. Share an easy stroll with Yuka and Yoshimi through a foggy Japanese mountain top.

Tracks:

Tell Me Where Is Fancy Bred
There Is a Garden in Her Face
The Urchin's Dance
Riddle Song
Midnight's Bell
The Bellman's Song
Flower of Beauty
The Keel Row
The Turtle Dove
Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair
Lamorna
Black Sheep
Down by the Sally Gardens
He's Gone Away
Swansea Town
The Oak and The Ash
Early One Morning
I Know Where I'm

Customer Reviews:

What a beautiful CD!.......2003-11-23

I saw this CD in a store and since I had previously heard the group at a performance in St. Charles, I thought I'd buy it. I'm very happy I did. I play it all the time. Beautiful vocals and music. They start with some wonderful John Rutter compostitions highlighting the Metropolis Chamber Orchestra and then move into more traditional choral music featuring American and British folk songs. Shenendoah closes out the CD and is just beautiful. When I heard them do it live they moved out into the church and surrounded the audience. What a moment. This CD captures the feeling of the performance and I'm glad I have it.

Average customer rating:

Pretty Awful
digging "flower" in the desert
Ambient, loungy stuff
sound sculpture on the go, if you will
Junkmedia.org Review - Concept outshines content

Flower With No Color
Yoshimi & Yuka
Manufacturer: Ipecac Recordings
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

Ambient | Dance & DJ | Styles | Music

General | Dance & DJ | Styles | Music

Electronica | Dance & DJ | Styles | Music

General | Rock | Styles | Music

Pop Rock | Pop | Styles | Music

General | Easy Listening | Pop | Styles | Music

Experimental Music | Miscellaneous | Styles | Music

Eucademix
Memories Are My Only Witness
Ecdysis
The Two EPs
Super Relax

ASIN: B00008OM69
Release Date: 2003-04-08

Tracks:

UMEgination
Ha Wa ii Na
KoRoKoKoRo 'N Insects
SPY said ONE
La Donna Ni Demo Des Kinna
Mow Deck In Eye
elegant bird

Album Description

Pop rock icons Yoshimi (Boredoms) and Yuka Honda (Cibo Matto) have joined forces to bring you an unexpected ambient gem. Tribal, beautiful and classic(al) all at once, and much like the women who created it, the album is dreamy and classic. Recorded at Mt. Ikoma in Nara & at Free People Studio on Osaka over 4 inspired days. Share an easy stroll with Yuka and Yoshimi through a foggy Japanese mountain top.

Customer Reviews:

Pretty Awful.......2006-11-26

First of all, this is not ambient music. It's not even music. Sounds from xylophone and percussion, along with sampling of sounds (bird noise, waves, other stuff) are combined arythmically and experimentally to create...well, nothing much. I can't imagine why you would prefer to turn this on. It provides a limited amount of atmosphere, but no real mood. It grabs your attention occasionally with a mix-up of sounds, but then doesn't reward you should you concentrate on it. Avoid this one, unless the above description is your bag.

digging "flower" in the desert .......2004-09-14

I was living in a community called Arcosanti, way out in the high Arizona desert when I heard this. After a crazy week I had asked a friend of mine with a great music collection to lend me some of the most relaxing, mellow music he had around, and this is one of the albums. I was living in a small, isolated cement cube on the edge of a deep, sandy dried up river bank. Large cottonwood trees grew along the shore and shaded my place, and a mesquite forest grew up on the other side of the bank, where cows would roam through. Chickens and peacocks ran around. I lay down in the shade and listened to this, and I more than chilled out... more than de-stressed. My heart opened up, I saw clearly again how beautiful my surroundings were. You know how in meditation, you're supposed to find that fine point between laxity and excitement? "Flower with no color" gave that to me. I lay there, completely awake, completely calm. And its no wonder... this album is very playful, and very elegant. No masturbatory experimentalism, no "take me seriously" wackiness. This is fun, and it feels incredibly natural. If I made some music, I mould hope to make it in this vein.

And it's not just me. I played this in the bronze foundry, where we "toiled" all day long sculpting gorgeous bronze bells. The foundry overlooks a series of mesas and fields. And I'm telling you, I put this on one afternoon when the more tiresome work was done, and everyone was just like, "What IS this? This is incredible!" It was good spirit food for everybody... and just to drive it home, I was doing a pretty wacky DJ set by my cement cube one day, playing everything from Merzbow to happy hardcore tracks (preferably together,) James Chance to Tibetan Buddhist chants, and I really noticed, out of all the dozens of artists I played, that people were in love with this. I put it on later at night during a going away party, and the love and discussions flew. In fact, my friend who had lent it to me slipped away with it just afterwards.

I'm sure the environment I was in, and the place I was at personally, leant a lot to the experience, and maybe the other reviewers didn't dig it so well because they were in to much of a "my living room" environment. But that's good! The fact that this music expresses where I was at during that wonderful time says it all. Take it on the road, take it through the desert and up into the mountains. And yes, I've enjoyed it many times since I moved to San Francisco, just sitting in my living room. PS: Mileece's "Formations" album did quite a lot to me out there too... peace.

Ambient, loungy stuff.......2004-02-13

"Flower With No Color" reminds me of a poem by Araki Yasusada:

A mud snail crawls-
in the world, sorrow and unhappiness
undulate, undulate

Like the poem, this collaboration between Yoshimi P-we of the Boredoms and Yuka Honda of Cibbo Matto is kind of pretty, kind of somber, but kind of meaningless. The songs are sparce conglomerations of faint melodies, backed by windchimes, barking dogs, computer blips and xylophone (among other sounds). Jazz and traditional Japanese music are obvious influences, but overall, the scattered ideas expressed by the songs on "Flower With No Color" are more exotic and experimental than anything else.

I've always enjoyed Cibbo Matto, Smokey and Miho, and at least appreciated the Boredoms. The prospect of a collaboraiton between Yuka and Yoshima excited me, because I thought it might bring Cibbo Matto's dancehall fun together with the Boredoms' heavy ambience. Instead, I find this album adrift in a sea of artisitic indulgence.

However, it is pretty, soothing and well-crafted. The trumpet on "Spy Said One" is lovely, and piano riffs on "UMEgination" and "Mow Deck In Eye" give hints of the amazing musical talent these two bring to the table. The album reminds me of some of the better Martin Denny albums, which is to say experimental lounge music. Delightful, really, but probably not what anyone buying this album would have expected.

Now you know...

sound sculpture on the go, if you will.......2003-06-06

For a long time, I had been hoping for a Boredoms side project that would really satisfy me. Ooioo wasn't it, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots certainly wasn't it, the projects of the other members didn't impress me either. Actually, the Boredoms themselves don't impress me that much, so much as the idea of the band impresses me. Their cover art impresses me. Not too slag on them, they're neat just not you know, excellent. But anyway, this album is pretty impressive. Sort of a combination of Jap-noise and pretty Chinese restaurant music. Recorded on a mountain top apparently. Very pretty, a little goofy. Highly recommended.

Junkmedia.org Review - Concept outshines content.......2003-06-01

Flower With No Color, a collaboration between Yoshimi P-we from the Boredoms and Yuka Honda from Cibo Matto, represents a triumph of concept over content. In theory the idea of two musicians packing a bunch of gear and some wine into a truck and recording songs as they drive up a mountain holds a lot of promise. In practice, however, the project is little more than an exercise in self-indulgence.

The songs often meander too much like the streams that the pair probably encountered on their way up Mt. Ikoma. There are neat effects here and there (the singing on "Ha Wa ii Na"; treated gongs on "UMEgination"; the twittering birds throughout), but Yoshimi's and Yuka's journey turned out to be more interesting than their musical destination.

They use bells, cymbals, xylophones, pianos, samples, vocals, wood blocks, guitars, drums, trumpets and nature sounds to create a mix of free jazz, electronica, New Age, and traditional Japanese music. But they don't dig into any of these musical styles enough. "SPY said ONE" holds the most promise, starting off with some cool, jazzy interplay of guitar, bass, trumpet and samples. But the song drags on for nearly 10 minutes, devolving into noodling, dogs barking and silly vocal manipulations. The New Age material is disjointed and would never provide the relaxation that so much music in that genre offers.

Listening to this album, I thought back to a two-man project called Bus Full of Witches that I did as a joke nearly 20 years ago (boombox recording with guitars, basses, drums, basketballs, power drills, hammers, etc.). Flower With No Color is better than that effort, but was created out of the same need to satisfy an experimental jones without concern for the experience it would give listeners.

Dave Brigham
Junkmedia.org Review

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