Oorutaichi!

Osaka musician and DJ Taichi Moriguchi, aka Oorutaichi, is playing a gig next month in London as part of the International Festival of Exploratory Music. I'm going to be there with bells on.

Through a small but significant trickle of underground singles and CD-R releases over the past decade, Oorutaichi has been quietly reimagining and reconfiguring the base folkloric elements of pop music in a funky, humanised electronic soup. His sound is a strangely alluring, shiny goop. It is odd, fun and playful. As Oorutaichi sings in his own invented language, drawing on a synthetic mythos of some fantastic planet, you sense this is where pop can go next, or ought to. As Momus put it last year, "his music sounds new to me, now, the way Neu! and La Dusseldorf and Can and Faust probably sounded to David Bowie in 1977".

The dizzyingly groovy 2007 album Drifting My Folklore, a refinement and summation of his work up to that point, is essential. It includes the 2006 disco "Misen Gymnastics", which was my first introduction to Oorutaichi pop.