Tujiko Noriko: Shojo Toshi Tujiko Noriko: Shojo Toshi (Mego - 2001) Skateboarding around in her underwear, a fur coat and bright red helmet Tujiko Noriko seems like a fun girl rebelling in kookiness; her eclectic electronica tends toward a lo-fi ephemerality with plenty of attractive kinks in their soft quirky tunefulness. Her Shojo Toshi is a weird and wonderful place for your ears to visit. Like the disc's packaging, the sounds inside are colorful, cute, and fun, if a little strange. A squeaky-metal-door sort of resonance seems to swing in time with the odd tonal chords of instrumental endless end (3:05). Lightly-accented choruses of "you're so beautiful" are stirred, slurred and layered into beatless white film. Keys and cymbals enter be be (7:42) to be permeated with more-aggressive electronic pulsations and lush vocal cut-ups. In the fifth track (whose title is in hand-scrawled Japanese characters) dream-pop whispers are backed by clockwork ticks, glitchy percussive spurts and other audio oddities. Unintelligble (to my ears) lyrics drift across the blurting organ sounds and chipper whistles of girl meets boy. A rough-and-loose prettiness seeps into the ninth (again, indecipherably-named) track, wafting upon plaintive vocal phrases, delicate piano meanderings, choral drifts and light beatronics. The noisier endpiece drifts on flutey drones and blast furnace gusts, with a circus-organ ditty which closing its final moments. Enigmatic yet accessible, and especially enjoyable because of that, Shojo Toshi introduces the interesting audio-concoctions of Tujiko Noriko, unpolished gems which dazzle the ears. An 8.7, with extra percentage points for her softness, sweetness and infectuous strangeness. Dutch East India is the source for this, and many other, interesting recordings from Mego and more... This review posted July 31, 2001 AmbiEntrance © 2001-1997 by David J Opdyke (except CD cover art, rights retained by original owners).