Album Review: Pulse of Defiance by Yoshinori Hayashi

Like so many forces of electronic music--see Warp co-founders Steve Beckett and Rob Mitchell, or Kelly Lee Owens--Japanese producer Yoshinori Hayashi spent formative years working in a record store. Hayashi's time at Tokyo's Face Records comes through in his genre-melding music, which overflows with the encyclopedic passion of an enthusiastic cratedigger. Yet his sounds extend far beyond fandom or homage.

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Photo by Takurou Kawakami Pulse Of Defiance by Yoshinori Hayashi Genre-hopping Japanese producer Yoshinori Hayashi's adventures in beat-driven, jazz-influenced electronica yield divergent results on the aptly named Pulse Of Defiance which finds him contrasting his rhythmic obsessions and melodic talent to occasionally surprising effect. Hayashi is at his best when he wriggles free of obvious influence and allows his own instincts to lead; so, for every, admittedly pretty decent club banger like the Underworld-indebted "Touch," there are explorations such as "Twilight" which opens with a pianist's breathy exhortations a la Monk or Taylor against a typewriter rhythm before bringing in a flute-like motif, wordless choir and a trip-hop beat. This dichotomy may stem from diffidence (I need the bangers to Trojan horse the experiments) or confidence (I can do all this and more), but Hayashi certainly knows his way around beat generation, jazzy dynamics and atmospheric ambience.

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