MOSKITOO - Drape

Coming from Japan, the new signing to the 12k roster offers a work inspired by the icy climate of her homeland. Born (in 1978) and raised in Sapporo, in the country's northernmost prefecture, Hokkaido, Sanae Yamasaki traces the genesis of her artistic pursuit to a striking instrumental imagination. Drawing on her modest musical arsenal (guitar, metallic percussion, a synth, drum machine, a few toy instruments), she crafts stylized, at times immaterial melodies, clearly minimalist in inspiration, full of digital swirls and shaped with great grace and attention to detail.

The encounter that allows her to realize her greatest wish — to release her music and make it available to an audience ("to tell one's own dreams") — is with Taylor Deupree, head of 12k, the label putting out the record. Always drawn to sounds from the Land of the Rising Sun, Deupree has often welcomed Japanese artists onto his roster, among them Sawako, Gutevolk, Piana and Minamo. Now Moskitoo joins them too.

"Drape" echoes certain rhythmic and timbral structures typical of the aforementioned artists: the affinities with Sawako's concrete abstractions and the digital structures of Piana's first album ("Snow Bird") are very strong, although what sets this apart is its slightly out-of-time, out-of-logic approach. While the fully instrumental passages crack open a shell of long-repressed emotion, seemingly written with uncontainable impulse, the episodes in which Sanae uses her voice (never processed with effects) release a magic full of daydream and splendor, reaching heights of enchantment that appear boundless.

Two more traits deserve to be highlighted, useful for unpacking the seemingly hidden nature of Moskitoo's art. Her attention to the sounds she uses leads her to pack her compositions with countless samples that, despite being unrecognizable, lend every song a thoroughly mysterious charm. The second point worth noting is her passion for drawing and the visual arts. An abstract ability to "sketch" harmonic lattices is evident, and these inclinations have surely helped her reach the finished result.

The story of "Drape" unfolds with "Paddle", a kind of introduction. Metallic moans, then buoyed by aquatic sounds of the purest beauty, linger alongside the voice, timid, almost withdrawn. A piano, with its sporadic notes and bowed head, sets the pace, then gets distracted and diverted by a few digital jolts, leading to an ending caught between an icy, lashing gust of wind and a warm glow that points the way to "Skie"; and immediately a spell begins to vibrate. A xylophone descends and plays, accompanied by a sketch that runs wild with development and creativity. Everything keeps unspooling with great grace; as the seconds pass, the voice is added, along with small sobs and a graceful flair.

The following "De Sii?" is a tiny vignette enclosed in a cyclical chase of muffled timbres, and it impresses with its compositional personality, as does "Manima No Lemon", the logical, more drawn-out and convoluted continuation, with further vocal inserts and ideas that reveal an enviable flair, not least for the strong progressive pull running through the track: its almost silent start, in fact, lands on a very full-bodied yet still graceful conclusion.

The union of synthetic drones and electronic gurgles is refreshed with a surprise in the brief "Tarantilla", highlighting, as in the previous episodes, a certain restless animosity in Moskitoo's music, always duly hidden and masked beneath a veneer of muted color.

The lyrics once again offer up joy and sincerity ("Terrier"), amid a clamor of ambient inspiration and Japanese tradition; the rural samples of "Shaggy" carry a certain amateurish, rustic quality, perfectly propped up by a metallophone score that is dissonant at times.

As we head toward the closing stretch of the record, we come across one of its most experimental moments, since "Tip Toe Blues" severs the line of apparent regularity that held the first half together, plunging instead into the churn of a crumpled, disjointed melody; the voice is untethered from the sounds, inducing a slight sense of unease that only enriches the recipe further. An episode that hints at future directions for Moskitoo's music, perhaps further from glitch-pop standards and closer to a certain vocal avant-garde of European stamp (AGF) but also Japanese (the latest album by Tujiko Noriko).

There's little left to say except that old loves always leave their mark. The typical unfolding of "Wham & Whammy", which closely echoes the style of early Tujiko Noriko, is irresistible. This is pure glitch-pop, full of microscopic, tiny sounds, propped up by a timeless imagination drawn from classic indie-tronica, filtered through Japanese sweetness. The drum-machine beat (this time straight and precise) is surrounded by splashes of colorful synth and a chorus that lodges itself in your head: "Oh-Oh-Oh.. Don't Never Wake Up..".

Eager for confirmation, we happily let ourselves be lulled by the closing "Watashi No Neml Tabi", where the urge to surprise is rounded out with work on vocal layering, always backed by a thoroughly respectable and highly original rhythmic framework.

Without drawing out this in-depth analysis any further, we'll close by highlighting the musical research of 12k and its founder Taylor Deupree, capable of unearthing talents otherwise destined to remain confined to their own world, unable to "tell their own dreams" - and after all, anyone able to do so through music can only earn our applause.

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30/04/2026