Entry 404 - Wushimi Complex - The Anon Database

 

I had the pleasure of speaking to both Wuso and Yoshimi about this release some years ago. It was fun picking their brains about what I thought was a collaborative release between the two artists... turns out it's actually a split.

Yoshimi wrote half the songs on Wushimi and Wuso wrote the other four. It's too far removed for me to remember who did what track, but it had me floored when I first found this out. The entire release sounds so cohesive that I never once thought that it was a split release.

The music on Wushimi Complex is beat driven dreampunk. The atmosphere is so thick it feels like a dense layer of smog while walking through a city street at night. The pace is restrained throughout, keeping with dreampunk's rather laid back tempos most of the time. The real star here though is the melodies and how they revisit themselves throughout the release.

The melodies are played on highly saturated instruments that sound similar to a neon lamp lighting up. Every single instrument and all the sound design here is meant to sound man made; made by computers. No element of nature or acoustic instrumentation can be found within any of the songs within the album.

It's this sound design that helps maintain the focus of the album throughout. There are basically two types of song structures on the album. If I remember correctly it was Yoshimi's tracks that had that ABA formula for half the songs while Wuso's songs had a more linear format. Both work well within and neither get old throughout the rather short runtime.

To my knowledge this is the only collab that happened with Yoshimi and Wuso. Both of these artists are well known within the dreampunk genre, and this release shows why.