Sound Contours

A small label run by Nobukazu Takemura in Kyoto from 1994 to 2007, Childisc was subtly groundbreaking. Takemura was at the cutting edge: beyond just granular synthesis, his output randomizers affected melody, his glitches (the sounds of ordered processes going awry) became pleasant listening, MIDI noise was incorporated into music, and the voices of robots -- hidden like kodama in a personal computer -- were friendly and cute, rather than isolating and threatening. Though he deserves his own episode, Takemura put out most of his best work on Childisc and honed a singular aesthetic there, curating the work of lesser known yet likeminded artists from around Japan and pairing it with his own. Childisc was about mystery and wonder -- a pairing of experimentalism and whimsy, where cute or kawaii voices and melodies were peppered with challenging bursts of blips and bloops. Electronic noises were slyly recontextualized as atmospheric music or percussion instruments; trip-hop and breezy, Brazil-inflected beats were