Yuko Nexus6's third solo album is a strange but extremely charming experiment in sound collage. At the heart of Journal de Tokyo (Tokyo Diary) is an interest in the voice as well as a fascination for the cassette underground. Voices (Nexus6 and Mariko Tajiri) read excerpts from short stories by Hyakken Uchida, both in Japanese and French. They are treated, looped, or left naked and form the leitmotif of the work. The album cover depicts a standard two-track stereo cassette. Some of these are used in the album (the opening track features a reading recorded in a cassette player at the same time it was captured on the master tape; the cassette is then rewound and played back to introduce a second level of "narration"). But the real innovation of Journal de Tokyo is its structure. Past the first track is a single 48-minute piece ("Voici le Temps de Lecture," which translates to "Here's the Duration"), a session between Nexus6 and Tajiri recorded on a digital audio tape. Afterwards, the artist taped 21 short tracks over the session. Of the original session, listeners can only hear short snippets between the playful sound collages. Light electronic music, field recordings, an improvisation with the group Hose, and the voice-based experiments come together to form a fragmented but very playful narrative. There is something mischievous and childlike in Nexus6's approach, a lightness that makes the album palatable without taking away its demanding nature. ~ François Couture, All Music Guide
