Yuri Umemoto - Concerts

Yuri Umemoto
Concerts
Isengard
Japan/Belgium, 2026
LP

The most baffling, delightful surprise of the year so far, Concerts is my first encounter with the Tokyo-born, Europe-traversing composer Yuri Umemoto. Named for the days of the week, the seven short compositions on this record started life as surreal, brightly lit fashion/art world photographs, which were then translated into words and finally translated again into sound. The words are apparently delivered in the sampled voice of a high school classmate of Umemoto's, in a mix of English and Japanese, reading like a cross between intrusive thoughts and internet slop. It may take a quick scan of the album's back cover to pick the languages apart; sonically, what's striking is the cross between the vocalist's bright, exuberant voice and Umemoto's florid, instinctive melodicism, reminding me of my first encounter with Joanna Newsom on the one hand and the hyper-pop of SOPHIE on the other.

Accompanying this hyperreal voice are absolutely gorgeous string trio arrangements, pulling with and against the melodies with such feeling and grace that their silliness becomes something else: vulnerability, half-formed fears and doubts, libidinal drives in all their absurd, unsublimated obviousness. It's the least self-serious—and thus, the most serious—attempt I've heard to compose art music for our lurid times. In Umemoto's hands, the byproducts of late-capitalist online culture are not unseemly travesties to be kept firmly on the other side of the cordon from high culture; they're raw materials with all the bioluminescent strangeness of the natural world.

I expect frequent visitors to this site share with me a certain restlessness, an unquenchable thirst for new feelings or novel combinations of them, emotional shadings manifested in real time by new modes of expression. I can't think of another record this year that came closer to inventing a new color for me. I'd serve it to anyone who says "surprise me" (and means it).