A gentle, thoughtful musician, Yuka Honda has been a mainstay of New York's avant-pop melting pot for twenty years. She is best known for her mid/late 90's duo Cibo Matto, who's irreverent, jubilant and hip two albums offered a wide spectrum of unabashed joyfulness. After the rupture, Miho Hatori did a stint in Gorillaz then junked modernism for Bossa nova. Honda took a different route. She united with many interesting collaborators, especially like-minded women such as Yoshimi, Ikue Mori and Petra Haden. Her sensitive contributions, alongside Cornelius and ex boyfriend Sean Lennon, led to Yoko Ono's Between My Head And The Sky being unexpectedly wonderful, a sympathetic testament to Ono's originality and scope. Her three solo albums have all been issued on John Zorn's diverse Tzadik label without much fanfare or recognition of her talents.
In the latest chapter of an unknown fantasia, Heart Chamber Phantoms, she opens a space for specters to come out to play. Virginia Woolf types a liner note "It is far harder to kill a phantom than reality" This is a soothing seance, genuinely mysterious and ungraspable, a digi-jazz landscape. Michael Leonhart's trumpet often dominates in looped figures, looming from the cosmos in a manner akin to Jon Hassle's fourth world physics. A maze of noir, the music rejects relation to everyday signification. In a funked up fashion it forms a hidden trail to Mori/Parkins' Phantom Orchard with it's sensual take on abstraction. What narratives drift inside these instrumentals are beholden to the individual listener.
