What is not strange?

Tashi Wada was born into the avant-garde. Growing up in a building shared by Fluxus artists, Wada lived next door to choreographer Simone Forti. Video artist Nam June Paik was in the upstairs apartment. His father, the legendary composer Yoshi Wada, worked as a plumber by day and an artist by night, stretching the boundaries of minimalism by incorporating Scottish bagpipes and Indian ragas. Tashi's own work is rarely described without reference to these pioneering drones, but he brushes off questions about paternal influence. “Sometimes I have a sense of how my work is perceived in relation to my father's, but I tend to limit my understanding to my personal space and how I feel about it,” he said. in a 2019 interview. “I leave the rest to the world to sort out.”

While the music output of the younger Wada is certainly related to the older, it is not an imitation. Yoshi gravitated toward grandiose gestures, recording bagpipes in an empty swimming pool or composing for astonishingly loud acoustic bursts typically used for naval emergencies. Tashi is more academic, preferring to create microtones with unusual tuning systems rather than massive volume. After studying with James Tenney, he made a connection between the Fluxus movement and a younger generation of artists centered around the CalArts music program. The album of 2018 album/frkwys-vol-14-nue” class=”external-link” data-event-click=”{"element":"ExternalLink","outgoingURL":"https://tashiwada.bandcamp.com/album/frkwys-vol-14-nue"}” href=”https://tashiwada.bandcamp.com/album/frkwys-vol-14-nue” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>Nue, credited to Tashi Wada with Yoshi Wada and Friends, represented a passing of the torch: Yoshi and Forti appeared alongside CalArts alums Julia Holter and Corey Fogel. With What is not strange?Wada takes the next step, moving from the periphery of his father's community to the center of his own and demonstrating a new maturity as a composer in the process.

The biggest surprise here is that Wada has written honest songs, albeit rather strange ones. This shift was due in part to life events that drew him away from abstraction and into more expressive forms. In the years after Nue, Yoshi died and Tashi fathered a child with Holter, his partner. “Grand Trine,” a bright chamber-pop number, celebrates their daughter. Its title refers to three planets forming an equilateral triangle in her astrological chart, but the trio of father, mother and daughter is clearly the theme of the song. “She's my star,” Holter wails over elegant harpsichord and strings. The instruments jump to sharp peaks only to disappear again and again, like a wave of joy that dissipates only to return with renewed vigor. But the mood is troubled on the following song, “Revealed Night,” which is built on an urban recording of distant sirens, evoking the pandemic it was born into.