You Don’t Need Magic

HUH are the wild, freeform duo of Kyosuke Terada and Takuma Mori. Based in Tokyo, and playing together since 2007, HUH have released a clutch of cassettes, CD-Rs, and digital albums; they’ve toured Europe (in 2017) and Australia (2019); and they count amongst their collaborators the likes of T Mikawa of Incapacitants, ASTRO, and Government Alpha. You may know Terada from his duo with Shizuo Uchida, MAI MAO, who recently released an LP on An’archives, but he’s super prolific, performing solo and in groups like The Obey Unit, Bay City Rolaz, Praymate, Terror Shit, Death After Death, and more. Takuma Mori also records solo and is one half of duos Cosmetic i and Don’t Let Me Fantastic.

So, they’re busy, energetic musicians –but even that doesn’t quite explain the bustling energy and furious dislocation of the music they make together as HUH. It’s incredible, brain-blatting stuff, moving at a fierce clip between ideas, instruments, and styles –on a track like “Jewels in blue pee”, for example, a plunking banjo riff is repeatedly effaced by stumble-drunk drums, rumbling bass, and incongruous, high-wire blasts of electronics. There are voices in here, but they’re often mangled and distorted; rarely comprehensible, they melt into the unpredictable structures Terada and Mori build out of their junk kit.

HUH call themselves ‘free-form freak-out / noise improvisation’, and there’s a touch of the Familiar Ugly in the collective stammer and stutter central to their music. They’re remarkably untroubled by anyone’s expectations, resulting in a music that’s as confusing as it is compelling, full of clamour and vigour, but never for the sake of it: these seven improvisations, sometimes song-like, sometimes careening and hyperactive, sometimes smeared and abstract, all make their own kind of perfect un-sense. Line them up next to similarly puzzling yet enthralling gutterpunk improv units: Smegma, Bone Cure, Nihilist Spasm Band, Crayon Skidder.