Tujiko Noriko: Cr​é​puscule I & II Album Review

Tujiko Noriko’s music has never felt entirely of this world. From the curious tumult of early albums like Shojo Toshi and Make Me Hard, it was possible to imagine the Osaka native—since the early 2000s, a resident of the Parisian suburbs—as an intergalactic observer of earthling culture intent upon recreating the planet’s music out of radio-telescope transmissions and scraps of space junk. Tujiko professed to make pop music, yet her songs bubbled over with chaos: a hodgepodge of distorted organs, clacking typewriters, and cats’ meows, all of it suffused in digital glitches and analog grit. Her arrangements seemed governed by the logic of Saturday-morning cartoons—sticky blobs of supersaturated color unbound by gravity—and her high, breathy voice telegraphed a sense of childlike wonder. But despite her cheerful disregard for convention, there was nothing naive about her work; it was clear she knew exactly what she was doing. “I usually start out with a classic structure,” she once told an interviewer. “Melody, lyric, singing. But I almost can’t stop myself from making it a little bit strange and even uncomfortable sometimes.” Not for the sake of being difficult, she added. “I just like to experiment. I like to use a frame, but to try to shake the frame a little bit.”

More than two decades since she began recording, Tujiko’s output has slowed from the fevered pace she kept up in the 2000s; her last solo album was 2014’s My Ghost Comes Back, a cozily sentimental record wrapped in mandolin, musical saw, and other unusual acoustic timbres. Since then she has released only two titles, Kuro and Surge, both soundtracks; perhaps not coincidentally, an unmistakably cinematic influence is audible in the evocatively hushed atmospheres of her new album Crépuscule I & II. This time, Tujiko hasn’t so much shaken the frame as swapped in a whole new camera. Gone are the whimsy, the crunch, the surfeit of stimuli that once made the act of listening to her music feel like sensory overload. In their place, she has summoned an hour and 46 minutes of soft, luminous ambient music of alien beauty and human warmth.

The album is divided across two discs: roughly speaking, one of songs and another of soundscapes, although the line between those two modes is often notional. Disc 1 opens with a short, wistful instrumental that glistens like a fistful of beach glass: Tujiko’s playing is tentative, her timekeeping halting, apparently untethered to the computer’s internal clock. This ruminative mood deepens across the album as the titular twilight darkens. The next song, “The Promenade Vanishes,” prominently featuring her voice, is equally spare. Like its predecessor, it feels like a live performance, though delicate layering and other electronic effects—not to mention earth-shakingly low sub-bass—attest to digital processes carried out behind the scenes.