Flower With No Color begins with the scale turned down. A piano phrase, electronic chirps, environmental sound: nothing arrives with the force associated with Yoshimi P-We’s drumming in Boredoms, or with the sample-minded pop Yuka Honda built in Cibo Matto. The surprise is how little either musician needs to prove.
The two met in New York in 1993, when Honda encountered Yoshimi around a Boredoms show at CBGB. A decade later their shared record appeared on Ipecac Recordings, released on 8 April 2003. Honda had already moved from Cibo Matto into solo work, releasing Memories Are My Only Witness through Tzadik; Yoshimi’s parallel world included Boredoms and OOIOO. Their collaboration sits somewhere between those histories while sounding beholden to neither.
The instrumentation explains part of its peculiar softness. Yoshimi is credited across percussion, drums, guitar, piano, trumpet, synthesizer, bamboo flute and whistle; Honda plays piano, electric piano, bass, synthesizer and voice. Rather than turn that inventory into maximalism, they treat instruments as sources of colour and incident.
Seven tracks occupy nearly 56 minutes. UMEgination opens gently, while the miniature KoRoKoKoRo’N Insects lasts less than two minutes. Spy Said One expands past nine. Then comes the record’s strange centre of gravity: Mow Deck in Eye, a 27-minute drift in which piano, percussion, electronics and voices seem less interested in progression than in inhabiting a place.
Place is not merely metaphor here.
The sessions involved recording around Mount Ikoma, with the musicians travelling with instruments and capturing sound outside the normal studio frame. That environmental attention changes the record’s sense of foreground and background. An insect, a resonant object or a passing texture can carry as much compositional weight as a keyboard line. The music feels assembled through listening as much as playing.
That puts Flower With No Color in an intriguing position beside the more confrontational experimental music associated with both artists. Its radical gesture is patience. The duo allow passages to remain unresolved, permit prettiness without turning it into sentiment, and leave enough air around individual sounds for their surfaces to become audible.
The closing Elegant Bird lasts barely two minutes, a concise exit after the album’s long central wander. It makes the whole record feel less like a sequence of songs than a temporary habitat. Yoshimi and Yuka enter it, move things around, listen to what answers back, and leave before the space can harden into a style.
