Kyoto, Japan's
Aoki Takamasa carves a straight line through glitch culture's cold tempos and often hostile personalities. Named after Masakazu Tagaki and
Takamasa's touring multimedia project,
Silicom plays down the severity of intelligent electronic music to give everything a pleasant linear drive. "Sin" could very well be
Boards of Canada with jerking peculiarities, while "Vos" avoids the sonic snobbery of compatriots like
Nobukazu Takemura with lucid production bullet-points and an (effectively) unexcited pop edge lurking beneath the traditional hi-tech machine sounds and voice modulation. Underground techno experiments with rediscovered logic;
Plaid's
P-Brane EP would later pick up where
Silicom's minimized stadium breakbeats left off.