TUJIKO NORIKO - Blurred In My Mirror

Amateur embroidery from a delicate, fragile soul. Mellow tones of an ingenuous nature.

Tujiko's world is a treasure chest, impenetrable to anyone lacking a particular sensitivity. Through the gems of her discography, we let ourselves be swept away by a tide of sounds, emotions and sensations, in a riot of images.

The latest, stunning "28", made with the brilliant bleep-sculptor Aoki Takamasa, is just one of the most recent gifts from a dazzling career that has never lacked inspiration.

Her masterpiece remains the touching "From Tokyo To Niagara", a digital abstraction of a song-form as unusual as it is affecting. Songs as frail as a dry branch. Docile, colorful sketches. Chimes both sugary and bitter at once.

Disturbing and noisy is the offering on another recently released record, titled "Stereotype", under the moniker Dacm. This time she's not alone, but gets help, as on "28", from (another) electronic genius: Pita.

Looking back through her discography, how can one forget dazzling little gems like the double album "Hard Ni Sasete", a stunning showcase of her artistic mastery? Not to mention the sparkling little picture of beauty that is "Shojo Toshi".

"Blurred in My Mirror" is an underground record. It gets under your skin over time, and once it has found the key to your soul it afflicts you with a pleasurable intensity. These are seven abrasive, mysterious compositions, with no center of gravity to hold onto in order to stay balanced. Instability crops up often, leaving us thrown off-kilter.

A light, soft hiss opens "Niagara Hospital". Microscopic glitches soil an already disorienting beginning. A precise, metallic beat dictates a cavernous, thoroughly delirious rhythm. Tujiko seems almost to speak rather than sing. The grace of her Japanese vocals, steeped in delightful sweetness, in thunderous simplicity. Piano counterpoints seem impossibly distant, gusts of wind tear through the silence, dusty remnants of some titanic struggle bequeath us their details.

"Tablet Of Memory" feels like the account of a harrowing day. Hints of suffering, melancholy in the way the words are delivered. Sounds that are cruel and sickly. Undulating synths, a dry, vaguely industrial drum machine. A guitar, shy and set apart, scatters loops into every corner and intrudes insistently. Clicks of every kind depict a jagged, pointed rock hurled against the imaginary walls of our senses.

Sloppy and without a hint of melody, the following "I'm Not Dreaming, King".

A blazing, disjointed snare-drum motion, interstellar centrifuges of glitch, the irritating mutter of a wind instrument with neither head nor tail, the disturbing presence of a layer of delay. As usual, the voice seems completely detached, reciting its poetry with apparent indifference. Leaving us incredulous.

Dilated, delicate, dreamlike, spatial. Four essential words to broadly describe "Switch Of The Sun In You". Seven minutes of complete sonic catharsis.

Abandoning the senses to a booming, deserted, sprawling expanse. Grainy images. Thin, impalpable, hinted-at, muffled filaments. The pale lingering of an obsession. Plundered guitar arpeggios, the cyclical repetition of a single keyboard note, the ethereal dissolving of arcane interweavings.

In "Shayou (Setting Sun)" deep beats accompany the listener throughout its entire length, booming and bouncing rhythmically, while the voice slithers, coiled around the usual seasoning of uncomfortable sounds. Overlapping verbs and phrases, hurried, unhealthy counterpoints, imperceptible phonemes paint a dark, shadowy, lashing landscape.

Opening "Tennisplayer Makes A Smile" awaits us a distorted Tujiko, pushed by limpid guitar notes toward an alternation of silences ranging from the celestial to the anguished, broken by sharp cries that fold back into the warped moans. The soundtrack of a fragmented, disjointed, aleatory environment. Statements delivered with barely concealed suffering, an omen of a painful condition.

The album closes with "Magpies and Mornings": the artist bids us farewell by taking us into a fairy-tale garden, amid a continuous echo of vowels, rustling and chirping. Energy radiates simultaneously from all these elements, saturating the space until it recedes, leaving us in intimacy with one last goodbye, a warm and sincere smile.

A record made of secluded, hidden moments. A work made of fragments of isolated affliction. A shimmer of cold, impassive, angular emotions. Often the best emotions are whispered, and Tujiko proves it with brazen gentleness. The exquisiteness of an earthly angel with fragile, docile features. The song of a solitary nightingale needing to express its frustrations through music. Music for fragile, breakable souls. Little hearts shattered and delightfully consolable.

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30/04/2026