Lena Saito, die bereits unter dem Namen Galcid aufgetreten ist, bringt bei Mille Plateaux ihr erstes Album unter dem Projektnamen Saito heraus, das zwölf hypnotische Synthesizer-Improvisationen voller pulsierender Industralsounds und der einen oder anderen literarischen Anspielung vereint. Die Entscheidung für den Familiennamen als Moniker könnte auch an der Zusammenarbeit mit ihrem Ehemann, dem Analogspezialisten Hisashi Saito liegen, der für die Produktion von Downfall verantwortlich zeichnet.
“Having descended from a long line of Japanese sword-smiths, the industrial sound of smashing steel is embedded in Lena’s DNA and reflected in her music, however there are also refined, hypnotic tones showing a side with more finesse. The music itself is not scored and is predominantly improvised. Words and vocals are ad libbed as well. Sometimes the machines respond as if through telekinesis, altogether emitting a sound which can be categorized somewhere in the range between modern experimental dance music and something possibly making more sense to enlightened minds as a new example for the ultrablack of music.
The album is a good example for a haunting rhythm – vibrating, pulsing, humming under the route of immanence, cutting through the concrete, when you listen close enough. The endeavour of Non-Music weaponized itself some time ago with the thought-synthesizing inventiveness and toolkit experimentality, so wildly performed by Deleuze and Guattari as a new generic mode of thinking and its ten thousand millions lines of flight, billion de/terretorialising wish-vectors – a conceptual bestiary sicced on the (geo)political, economic, aesthetic, cosmological and social problematics of their time.” (Mille Plateaux)