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Takuro Okada — The Near End, the Dark Night, the County Line
(Bandcamp Temporal Drift DRFT-15, 2025, LP / DL)

by Jon Davis, Published 2025-08-13

The Near End, the Dark Night, the County Line Cover art

Takuro Okada has a number of solo albums out on a variety of Japanese labels, but The Near End, the Dark Night, the County Line is the first to be released outside of Japan. It’s a compilation of tracks recorded since 2014, some of which have been available on his Bandcamp page, though here they’ve been remastered for this collection. The thirteen tracks venture into a variety of sounds, primarily built around the guitar, with Okada also playing piano, bass, drums, percussion, pedal steel, samples, clarinet, violin, and mandolin; there are also occasional guest contributors on sax, drums, vocals, double bass, and added guitar. The overall mood is calm and gentle, with sparse arrangements and careful attention to atmosphere and timbre, and there’s nothing harsh or dissonant. The guitar sometimes has distortion on it, but more often, the tones are clean and modified by subtler effects such as reverb, delay, and glitchy granular modulation. “Shadow” has a touch of bossa-nova feel to it, and “Taco Beach” introduces a little surf guitar, but other tracks lean towards volume pedal fade-ins and sensuous echoes. This is music that occupies a region where typical genre labels don’t reach, and aspects of ambient music, Americana, jazz, psychedelia, and playful electronics blend into a cheerfully meditative swirl. This is not music that jumps out of the speakers demanding attention — it seduces the ears with quiet beauty and subliminal details, patiently exploring overlooked nooks and crannies of sound.

Filed under: New releases, 2025 releases

Related artist(s): Takuro Okada

More info
http://hitujiotoko22.bandcamp.com/album/the-near-end-the-dark-night-the-county-line

 

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