goat (JP)

What do you call techno without a drum machine, sequencer, or computer, or can you make electronic music without electronics beyond perhaps a bass or guitar? These are the kinds of tantalizing questions that goat (jp)—that is, goat, a stunning quintet from Osaka—have asked for the last dozen-plus years. Buttressing an assemblage of drums from around the world with saxophone and the accoutrements of a standard rock band, goat makes meticulously designed and militantly constructed worlds of rhythm, with dense polyrhythms and uncanny harmonies turning constant motion into complete trance. “I feel that the number of real bands are decreasing, bands that play live instruments,” founder Koshiro Hino once said. “goat is, and will continue to be, a band focusing on traditional instrumentation.”

A veteran of Japan’s experimental underground, Hino once saw an art exhibition of what he assumed were monochromatic computer prints. Upon closer inspection, though, they were intricate paintings, hands and minds adding a human dimension to what looked like the output of circuits. goat emerged from that epiphany. A membership swap a decade ago empowered Hino to pursue new rhythmic traditions, including Indonesian gamelan. Their score for Cindy Van Acker’s 2021 dance, Without References, moves from the pulverizing-and-pausing rhythms of “Factory” to the glorious metallophone-and-gong haze of “CR.” On their 2023 album Joy in Fear, goat expertly merged those worlds. Drums marched beneath howling winds on “Cold Heat,” while “GMF” used saxophone gasps as another layer inside a gamelan beat intricate enough to make you look for a laptop that didn’t exist. goat has been extolled as “the tightest band in existence,” but the music, like the entities who make it, also breathes, so that this feels less like techno mimicry than borrowing a blueprint and remaking the results by hand.