There are lots of clichés in the music world: "It's avant-garde"; "It's progressive"; "It defies genre". We also have lots of labels for things: noise, post-rock, drone, chamber pop, shoegaze. Yoshi Wada is one of those rare artists who allows his audience, whether it be critics or fans, to use both methods of description of his music - without feeling like a tool later.

In Off the Wall, the idea of 'noise' has really been brought to life. A lot of the sound presented in these three tracks (which run about twenty to thirty minutes apiece) is disjointed, a-melodic, and dissonant. Nearly the whole record features a drone in some capacity. And yet, the whole is inescapably musical in a way that a small group making what sound like random noises shouldn't be; that is a gift that no other artist has been capable of giving me. No one else, from Mike Patton to Liars to Ryoji Ikeda to The Locust, has been capable of producing 'noise' that sounds like noise.

This isn't to say that Off the Wall is just a droning, amorphous thing. There are moments in this collection that are quite beautiful and melodic; the use of tympani in particular brings the record to life, giving it a depth and an urgency that the pipes couldn't do alone. This is an art record, and the experience is more like looking at a painting or collection paintings than of listening to a record, which makes sense coming from someone who primarily does sound installations, and rarely commits music to tape.

Perhaps my favourite thing about this record is that it stands completely on its own. I can't make any comparisons to anything else I've ever heard. Even when there are flickers of something that might remind me of Steve Reich or Philip Glass, this is still so different that I never think about those composers. It is truly a unique record, one that becomes engrossing and changes the way everything else sounds.

-Lee Stablein