The Silhouette of Us by Kotoko Tanaka

While we often expect various aspects of our lives to either linearly improve or degrade, we experience the world instead as a series of plateaus connected by almost imperceptible intermittent changes. The Silhouette of Us by Kotoko Tanaka builds a psychedelic experience out of a series of stagnant plateaus, each one generally venturing deeper into off-center rhythms, difficult countermelodies, and alien instrumentation. A stable rhythm section holds the key to this songwriting structure, maintaining dependable motifs on the drums, bass, and rhythm guitar as vocals meander through a series of verses overhead. Mirroring our perception of time that sees years flying by in a blur and months dragging on for eternity, each song becomes permanent before suddenly shifting to another equally immersive, hypnotic groove, sending us briefly into freefall deeper into post-rock abstraction before leading us into a vast mirage of stability. With each step down, our worldview clutters, our confusion intensifies, and our core fractures, crawling closer to unity with the schizophrenic world we inhabit.