There’s no doubt that Astro, the venerable solo-turned-duo project of Hiroshi and Hiroko Hasegawa, will be a familiar name to many of you; Recovery Center and Yantra, however, probably not so much. After a bit of search bar detective work a wildly cross-continental image of the creation of Orchestrations to Paradise emerges: with one musical unit in Japan, the second in the Philippines, the third in Philadelphia(?), and then the record label in the Czech Republic, this ocean-hopping collaboration is quite a feat. Blending the lush, scalding psychedelia of the Hasegawas, the haphazard junkyard industrial of Chester Masangya and Pow Martinez (RC), and the versatile custom-built electronics (I think?) of whoever the hell Yantra is, the sweeping five-part suite shudders, soars, and screeches through waves of dense, organic noise and the fragile calmness between them; each of the sections, with the conspicuous exception of Part V, begins with reserved electroacoustic murk before swelling to much larger proportions, a consistent pattern that’s more appealingly cyclical than it is boring or predictable. The brutishly maximalist affair comes to a close with the aforementioned structural reversal in the final part, a loud, lumbering disintegration on an appropriately cosmic scale.
Noise Not Music 