I’m so used to Peter Taylor as Mortuus Auris & The Black Hand (MAbH) that when he mentioned to me that he’d released a tape under a new moniker on Portugese label OTA, I was sort of surprised. See, I’ve been pretty good at following OTA’s output, and I couldn’t believe I’d missed that. But sure enough, there was Kakusareta on the label’s page, an album listed under an artist called Yama-No-Kami (Japanese for “Yama’s hair”). That’s also Peter.
With two and two firmly mashed together in my mind, certain expectations also sprung up, MAbH expectations. “Uh uh uh!,” Peter tsk’d at me, also from my mind, waggling his finger back and forth like a schoolteacher to a dim student — turns out Kakusareta isn’t something that should be considered within the usual framework. “[Kakusareta] is an album of sketches, dreams, and minor compositions for anyone who will listen.”
Hey, that too works for me! Whereas MAbH’s output can fall on the heavy drone side, Peter as Yama-No-Kami opts for lighter fare, wisps of process and imagination sprinkled across an audio canvass in a, dare I say, playful manner. Truly, Kakusareta itself means “hidden,” and the themes Peter flits to and from form a narrative disassociated from waking logic. Whether he’s tracking down a “Seventh Continent” or drifting with “Big Sur Flotsam,” Peter follows the path he’s led by, not the prescribed one with the easy questions and pat answers. He lets it go; we do too.
It’s easy to lose yourself in Kakusareta — hide yourself from the world beneath its shimmering carapace.
More about: Mortuus Auris & The Black Hand, Yama-No-Kami
