ink puffy calico bonnets of sound. Worn by green toy tigers playing toy glockenspiels, one tinkly tin tine for each primary and secondary color. Skipping CDs, ukulele, interrupted wind chimes, glockenspiel, music box, repetitively sequenced micro-sampled organs, the soft, floaty comfort of a tiny Casio Sk-1; the percussive, bell-tone, trite, familiar. The small sounds. Steve Reich with a chastity fetish and a large collection of Otaku artifacts in his garage. Cute, yes. Contrived, perhaps. Lullatone calls it "pajama pop." By now this should seem old hat to listeners familiar with the almost aggressively naive, Henry Darger-esque musical tableau that Takemura developed by 1997's Child and Magic. This is what the record sounds like and it has earned the above rating on pure execution within its sub-genre, structural delicacy, and elegance. It's a lovely record; the compositions (if not the identity) are original and thoughtful. I truly enjoyed it. So let's get that out of the way. There is little more as such to say. If this review proceeds to talk more of Nobukazu Takemura than Lullatone (Shawn James Seymour) it is only because this record is more about Nobukazu Takemura than Lullatone.

Nobukazu Takemura's shadow looms so largely over little songs about raindrops that in a screen-printed fac-similar Warholian sort of way Lullatone is a Takemura record. This shouldn’t be as inappropriate or as insulting as it first sounds, though I suspect both Takemura and Seymour might both line up to kick my ass upon reading this (mind you, this is not my objective). A recent New York Times article invoked Warhol as the nearest antecedent in a discussion of the work of artist Takashi Murakami, perhaps among Takemura's closest artistic relatives (working in a different medium). Murakami, like Warhol, uses a stable of understudies in a factory-like setting to create his Manga-influenced characters. If Takemura still makes his own music, he also releases V/A compilations on his Childdisc label wherein every track could pass as a drop-dead ringer for his original work. Murakami even designed the cover of one of Takemura's Music For Issey Miyake records. But if little songs... is a perspicuous crayon rubbing of Takemura’s Child's View relief, certain questions about the relative success or failure of this culturally-specific pop arts' design come into sharper view with the example of Lullatone. For starters, Seymour is an American expatriate living in Osaka. For finishers, his work cleaves specifically and exclusively to the least confrontational aspects of Takemura's work and in so doing reduces the inner mechanisms of the music to pure (if currently quite palatable) sentimentality. If the scope of Takemura's work includes linking formal minimalism to the sonic analog to Murakami's pop-art serigraphy, it also extends broadly beyond what has been only one of many conceptual detours in the body of his work.

A chief innovation of Child and Magic (and many subsequent releases) of Takemura, Japanese DJ-turned heir-to-Steve Reich, was in its taking unmasked, concrete inspiration from the thinnest aspects of Japanese cute-maniacal pop culture and transforming the fetish elements via acts of clever displacement and structural electro-acoustic ingenuity. He also gave a stale classical minimalism its most complete step forward in 20 years. Musical icons of innocence, fetish and radical naiveté become both the structuring material and expressive content of his compositions. The music is fun, but never reductively so. It acknowledges the buttons it will push, how it will push them, how you will feel when they are pushed, and then takes you through the motions. And you go. But it's also not about that.

Murakami created a Mickey Mouse-like character called DOB, a recurring theme in his paintings. Takemura created a recurring vocabulary (which Lullatone has fully assimilated), a combination of the sounds of toys, childish la-la's, glockenspiels, music boxes, sampled and re-sequenced Casio keyboards, 8-bit crickets mingling with the habits and raiments of proto-childhood, idealized juvenility, exaggerated innocence. It is suggestive to read Takemura's recurring elements in light of Murakami's description: the "DOB is a self-portrait of the Japanese people...He is cute but has no meaning and understands nothing of life, sex, or reality." What changes then when an American in Japan joins the party, mimics the surface elements for, ostensibly, pure pleasure. Does it matter? Should it be of any concern when this perspective, wittingly or not, is regurgitated through an outsider's gaze?

On Seymour's website he posts an interview he conducted with Aki Tsuyuko, Takemura's partner, the anti-diva responsible for most of the la-las on his records (not to mention her own brilliant, confounding and thrillingly senseless release on Moikai). The interview consists entirely of questions on her feelings about chicken, bananas, 'UFO's or ghosts', her "favorite theme park in the world", and what she thinks of the color yellow. It is hard for Americans not to be caught up in the quirky, exotic, hyperactively referential aspects of Japanese pop culture (take the somewhat condescending, bemused showcase Tarantino gave The 5,6,7,8's in Kill Bill). But beyond satire or critique, both Murakami and Takemura share the same superficially superficial treatment of vapid cuteness, avoiding a pedagogical positioning of the work (though Murakami's own personal statements do not hedge his feelings, suggesting that Hello Kitty has no mouth because she has no voice, having been bombed into oblivion in August 1945...). Nevertheless both artists have a knack for placing the audience in evermore fascinatingly complex and discomforting positions in relation to the Cute.

Lullatone, by contrast, comes off as something altogether less layered: genuine naive love for genuine naiveties, a quasi-puerile aesthetic. But at least it's a coherent aesthetic. And it works. The results are unproblematic, wistful, unabashedly sentimental, and exceedingly listenable. Like all of the softest, prettiest, rain-soaked, forgettable lullaby moments that Takemura has offered us in the past, collected and re-packaged for one record's length of uninterrupted reverie (something Takemura does not give) designed for Sunday afternoons when you're too drained to be disquieted. That the fact of its simplicity, guilelessness, or even unoriginality should pose any sort of problematic issue for listeners raises worthwhile questions about both the culpability of self-expression in such matters, and indeed the baggage we bring to the table and expect from people who choose to express the designs of their internal psychic lives publicly.