n this new collaborative album, God Mountain label owner and versatile musician Hoppy Kamiyama joins up with bassist and producer Bill Laswell. The collaboration is an obvious move, as both Laswell and Kamiyama are disposed towards a glossy, well-polished, bassy mix that gives an accessible exterior to their experiments. It’s an approach that can often obscure the music underneath the overbearing production, but on A Navel City the thick production sheen is perfectly suited to the eclectic mix of styles and techniques on display.

The music is a liquid blend of jazz, electronics, dub, and improv, with percussionist Kiyohiko Semba providing a sturdy rhythmic undercurrent to the seamless fusion of Laswell’s deep, throbbing bass and Kamiyama’s elusive streams of synth melodies and drones. On “Sospirando”, Semba lays down a frenetic, shifty groove that evades classification just as readily as it snakes around the music’s deep-bass mystery. Kamiyama floats gorgeous shimmering melodies that fade in and out of the background, and synth squiggles periodically accent the rhythm. The whole thing has a sense of presence, a weighty feel that’s enhanced by Laswell’s impenetrable bass, with the production hanging over everything like a dark storm cloud, pregnant with rain.

Of course, this is Kamiyama, so not everything is quite so foreboding, and his sense of humor frequently shines through. “Zarathustra” is like a sunshower on a spring day, all bouncy drums buoying an airy synthesizer melody that rises and falls invitingly, a carnival tune beckoning you to ride a pastel-colored carousel. The whole thing climaxes with showering cymbals and agile bass exploding into a barrage of sampled voices and chattering electronics.

But the album reaches its true peak with the lengthy, explosive “Sad Emission”. More overtly jazzy than anything else on the CD, this track is driven by Kamiyama’s uncharacteristically jazz-influenced piano tinkling, while the drums slowly escalate over the sixteen minutes of the song, from the meditative opening to the chaotic blow-out of its finale, as the pile-up rhythms drive Kamiyama to increasingly feverish playing, and a wall of cyclic distortion and howling, heavily reverbed vocals builds up in waves, drowning out the piano and finally subsiding into silence.

This is another fine record from Kamiyama, a mix of styles blended so deftly that it defies language. There’s nothing particularly revolutionary about A Navel City—especially for those who have heard Laswell and Kamiyama in the past—but this trio manages to make compelling, fun music from the basic means of their own well-developed sounds.