the artist currently known as Sasuke Haraguchi
Could it be said that we all have lived long enough to slowly suffer the insemination of steel and machinery in our organic forms?
Growing pains are absolutely needed to become-anything; technology has bridged the gap to such an extent that it becomes pairable to the innateness of idle sitting. I often find myself completely immersed in the bright lights atop my desk, forgoing the fingertips on the keyboard, completely enamored in a protocol of one's and zeros (if absolutely magnified, of course), an inclination I could only ever refer to as a sublimation.
Social platforms have developed their own dress code and vernacular. A realm of infinite possibilities as well as eternal stagnation. Trends drape over the net in transience. The specters of nostalgia still remain in places, at least for the oldheads. In a wonky interpolation, internet culture has kept its hearths close to home and the accumulation of heat through processing burns a dark stain into itself.
And it is Friday night after all.
“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein
Sasuke Haraguchi is a multimedia artist born in year of 2003 and has been creating music since his teenage years. He places himself deep in the subculture of vocaloid and the cadres of MOGRA. If there were only one way to describe his work, it would totally be wonky.
Coupled with the surreal and metal-crashing industrial soundscapes, the design of his aesthetics are unidentifiable. Symbols that signify nothing, vectored shapes reminiscent of minimalist corporate design, and an obsession with the miniscule and mundane. By all accounts, his work comes off as incredibly "online" in so far that it posits a whimsy of technological antihumanist nihilism.
If not for it's foregrounded connection to vocaloid and, subsequently, the culture of Nico Nico Douga.
Through obvious elucidations of comment scrolls, the centrifugal force of phone screens, and the conceptualizing artistry of the protocols used to create them. Postmodernism's critiques consume all surrounding its tail end, and the shapes are oscillated in 4/4 reverberations.
Where a statement of culture might lie in surrealism, Sasuke Haraguchi makes it obvious that his music is merely an expression of styles and interesting techniques. But as with a vast category of "against traditional moe aesthetics" centric artists, there is an element of horror that persists in his antihuman rhetoric.
The lyrics of his music parade around the unfathomable hollow of self-image and authenticity. Questioning the sanctity and the time-told expectations of Japanese society, but-here lies an important distinction in his work and the current direction of-digital art movements, cynic annihilation.
I've spoken at (diminutive) length on this topic in a post inspired by the sublime experience of his masterwork, Cubibibibism. Here I denote the regression towards healthy lifestyles as indicative of a sort of self-help moratorium where the symbols of contemporary (if so) culture have taken shapes differing from the early optimism for the future.
The MADs and YTPs persist, and yet the city stagnates. Sasuke Haraguchi unintentionally burrows the postmodern ideals deeper into what we could all call ours. The only question that lies is "What's next?"
Although, he is currently enjoying working with large companies like Bandai Namco and Mercari. I will await his next vaguely alien post-work drenched in casual genius.