CD: Mouse On The Keys - The Flowers of Romance

The Mule Musiq family of labels, from Tokyo, is one of the great secret goldmines of the dance music world. The house, disco, techno and ambient music they put out from top worldwide producers can very often be tasteful to the point of innocuousness on the surface but, perhaps in keeping with the Japanese sense of wabi-sabi, when given your time and attention it almost invariably reveals hidden beauty that make their releases ones you can come back to over the years.

This album, however, seems the diametric opposite of their usual approach. It is, more or less, a jazz fusion record, but one that is very much in your face. There are no smooth, drifting, ephemeral textures in evidence, but rather a whole lot of upfront virtuosity and acute-angled rhythms. There are big romantic piano lines leading everything, and electronic processing and production values that feel at times like the fierce avant-drum'n'bass of Squarepusher. It jolts, it judders, it skronks and it clonks, and it certainly feels modern, often aggressively so.

And yet, and yet, this has hidden depths too. Listen to it loud on a crisp system and the subtleties of the Philip Glass patterns running through “Hilbert Dub” or the whispering electronic voices that float through the string quartet of the title track draw you behind the big themes and shiny surfaces and into something where magic is taking place. Make no mistake, this is neither as meditational nor as danceable as the bulk of the Mule catalogue, and you need to be in the mood for its more upfront clatterings – but the more you listen to it, the more it feels like it belongs in their illustrious catalogue.

Overleaf: watch the video for "Leviathan" from The Flowers of Romance