My recommendations 2006:Transparent Things by Fujiya & Miyagi

Fujiya & Miyagi: Transparent Things
Tirk 5/15/2006

It has been said that Fujiya & Miyagi are at the leading edge of a burgeoning krautrock revival movement. This may be true, but to me they seem to owe more to late 70s Kraftwerk proto-techno, Air, Parliament and DFA Records than they do to Neu! or Can. Actually, a corpus analysis of their lyrics, a shepherd's pie of English, French, German and Japanese, would reveal more about their influences than any of the Tirk Records talking points regurgitated by lazy critics thus far. Transparent Things borrows liberally from the best musical ideas to originate from all of these cultures in the past thirty years. For three years I have struggled to convince people to accept my theory about the origin of new musical forms: out of the current postmodernist recycling of 20th century styles, the first truly 21st century genres will eventually emerge. It seems now that I have been wasting my breath; I should just sit back and let bands like Fujiya & Miyagi prove my point.