Japanese Producer Foodman Picks Apart A Digital Feast On 'Clocks'

For the past seven years, the Yokohama, Japan-based producer Takahide Higuchi (who goes by the name 食品まつり aka Foodman) has dug into the quick-cut textures of footwork, making the Chicago-born style of electronic music his own. But then, Foodman began picking apart his digital feasts.

Aru Otoko No Densetsu, coming out in September via Sun Araw wizard Cameron Stallones' Sun Ark label, further explores the sounds first planted in 2016's EZ Minzoku. Foodman's disjointed beats, clipped samples and flashes of whimsical melody sound like the soundtrack to a lushly deconstructed video game, the kind with no discernible goal, just a fantastical world in which to get lost. There is a cartoonish quality to these songs that invest not just humor — carefully placed whoops and zings and boings — but an emotional attachment to the eureka moment, when the little sounds contribute to the sonic power-up.

The sophisticated glitch-hop track "Clock" features vocals from the Korean-born, Tokyo-based Machina, whom Takahide Higuchi met at a party. The video, directed by Prosper Unger-Hamilton, maps a CGI world onto nature with a first-person point of view, as bubbles and numbers and graphs examine dirt, icicle-dripped trucks and forests. Like Foodman's digital formations, it's a new environment constructed onto an old one.

Aru Otoko No Densetsu comes out Sept. 28 via Sun Ark.

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