Japan's most famous pop star does not exist, and here she fronts its most ferocious band. Hatsune Kaidan is the improbable union of Hijokaidan - the Kyoto-born group that has defined Japanese noise since 1979 - and Hatsune Miku, the turquoise-haired Vocaloid singing synthesizer developed by Crypton Future Media, a virtual idol who has filled arenas without ever drawing breath. Best, issued on CD by Alchemy Records in 2018, gathers fourteen tracks from the project's strange and glorious run - studio covers, live recordings, and previously unreleased remixes.
The pairing is less an anomaly than the logical endpoint of a long tradition. Jojo Hiroshige has spent decades throwing Hijokaidan against other worlds in his "Kaidan collaboration" series - with Michiro Endo of The Stalin, with the grindcore pioneers S.O.B., with Jun Togawa, with the alt-idol group BiS. Miku is simply the first collaborator with no body at all: onstage, she has been portrayed by a succession of human vocalists, first Kamin Shirahata, later LeChat, lip-syncing the machine's uncanny soprano into the teeth of the noise. It is a gesture worthy of the group's whole history - pop culture embraced and demolished in the same motion.
The repertoire reads like a scrambled jukebox of the Japanese twentieth century and beyond. The Velvet Underground's Femme Fatale and King Crimson's I Talk To The Wind sit beside Burt Bacharach's I'll Never Fall In Love Again; Senbonzakura, the Vocaloid anthem written for Miku herself, returns to her drenched in feedback; Perfume's Electro World, Jun Togawa's Suki Suki Daisuki, and the theme from the magical-girl anime Creamy Mami complete the picture. In each case the melody remains - sweet, synthetic, weirdly intact - while Hiroshige's guitar and the band's electronics rise around it like weather, the idol's voice gradually swallowed by the roar. The effect is genuinely destabilizing: kitsch and catharsis at once, the distance between J-pop and harsh noise revealed to be far shorter than anyone suspected. Three live tracks and three unreleased remix versions round out the set, documenting the project at its most unhinged.
Within the Alchemy catalog, Best is both a gateway and a provocation - possibly the most approachable record the King of Noise has ever put his name to, and for that very reason among the most subversive. Long scarce outside Japan, it is essential listening for anyone curious about where noise went when it stopped being underground - straight into the arms of a hologram.
