Genre: Electronica / Ambient

01 Sleep, Dream, Optimize
02 I’m the Man Who Sold the Calculator
03 Grain Blinds
04 An Ephemeral Thing
05 All Things Must Pass
06 Waiting in the Grain
07 You Daren’t Look Behind
08 Pulled DSPs
09 Laid Back Computing
10 ‘Til You Come
11 Goodbye Computer

The newest in new is a CD from Japan by a talented young artist named Sunao Inami. Electr-Ohm Records has just released her latest CD, entitled Laid Back Computing and it’s a hell of a listen. Even if it takes you two or three listens to get it, you will eventually learn to love it; then whenever you need to meditate or quietly cathartize you can put this new CD on “play.”

One can’t say it’s completely original or unique because you can hear some derivative sounds on this CD. But Ms. Inami’s influences synergize like magic and are reworked into a style all her own. Listening to Laid Back Computing brings one back to the days when Front 242 were really good (aka their Wax Trax! days) think of “I’m the Man Who Sold the Calculator” and “You Daren’t Look Behind;” one can also hear bits of Kraftwerk stuck inside tracks as in the opener, “Sleep, Dream, Optimize”, “Grain Blinds” as well as the title track. Besides her Japanese minimalism, Laid Back Computing has an Eastern European icy sheet of nihilism that one can actually see and feel during a CD session. Think of the dark green hills of northwestern Hungary, Romania or maybe those endless vistas in foggy hills around rural, bucolic Britain in the late autumn and you’ll get the idea.

The songs don’t all sound the same; you’ll hear the aforementioned influences in there, but there are many influences that commingle into this whole. Sunao Inami was totally involved in the whole process: she wrote the songs, recorded them, mixed and produced them. Not some pop princess, Inami is no chanteuse, no ingénue; rather she’s a smart, educated, yet still impressionistic artist who put together a fabulous record. Her Laid Back Computing is about as cool as one can find today in the Japanese or “import” record shelves.

I think her impressionability is a plus in her artistic endeavors. Sunao Inami’s combined several different, but not necessarily incongruous, sounds and she’s woven a vivid tapestry of instrumental, industrial-ambient tracks that soothe, agitate or put one into a trance, depending on their mood or state of mind. Laid Back Computing is a quiet storm of quirky pops, tingles and zings – it is not a loud metal machine outfit; however, the quiescence of Inami’s project belies a dynamic series of hallucinatory sounds and rhythms that take a step forward in creative outlets and at the same time shows what one can do who has many influences and uses them to invent something new and refreshing.