Myshiuno is the recording project of Bay Area filmmaker and composer Emmanuel Burton. His latest album Chinatown, San Francisco is an instrumental album “about getting caught up in a turf war and making a great attempt to escape it,” and Burton’s experimental sound is capable of such a weighty narrative.
Chinatown, San Francisco is built from an array of beats, ambient textures and lo-fi pop jams, a sound that is avant garde but not ostentatious. This is all the more impressive as Burton does not use samples, with each element 100% original and crafted especially for its place on the record. The result is vivid and varied, a kind of neon-dripped nocturnal pop that draws on R&B and improvisational jazz, as well as the ominous air of the hauntological Ghost Box sound.
‘You’re All Strangers To Me’ opens in typical disorientating fashion, immediately setting out a hostile, boisterous environment in a style somewhere between Burial and Death Grips. However, follow-up ‘Turf War In Chinatown, SF’ tones down the aggression in favour of something more subtle and pervasive, revealing both the talent of Burton and the triumph of his record. For all of its noise and strangeness, Myshiuno’s music feels organic, lived in, the collision of styles bringing to life the late capitalist milieu of sadness and violence and constant movement.
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=3867857396 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=4084646378]
So rather than just an aggressive in-your-face narrative about gangs and loyalties, Myshiuno instead captures an entire world. The identity and meaning drawn from such a situation, the loneliness too. The addiction and suffering that underpins the whole scenario, a storm brewed by decades of power imbalances and political apathy, not to mention the cultural encouragement to earn and own.
Whether it be the swagger of ‘Scrambled Eggs’, with its eddies of frantic tempo playing like a running street brawl, or the intangible and fleeting light of ‘Epiphany’, Myshiuno has crafted a collection snapshots of young life within, or under, such a system. And young the tone is, with recognisable blend of humour and melodrama, bravado and playful irony one minute (‘lmao’, ‘I Showed Them My Knife :^D’) and deadly seriousness the next (‘I Hold My Dead Best Friend In My Arms’). This is the product of such a style, where attempt at grand explanations is forgone in favour of on the ground, first-person experiences—life as it unfolds for young people, meaning everything and nothing at once.
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=3867857396 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=3655554814]
Chinatown, San Francisco is out now and you can get it from the Myshiuno Bandcamp page.
