Haku, ‘Ne Mele A Ka Haku (Music of Haku)’
EM Records, 10.17.2015
Haku is reportedly the alias of Frank Tavares, an obscure Hawaiian experimental composer who — in addition to any other accomplishments — produced at least one slipstream synth album of truly weird and spectacular proportions. Ne Mele A Ka Haku (Music of Haku) began life as a private press release in 1976, and though there isn’t much in the way of original source material for Tavares, internet chatter gives the impression of a real person with ties to Maui and Oahu and bits of commentary frequently suggest that he was “head of [the] music and drama department at Maui Community College.” There is an ancestry.com entry for an Hawaiian Frank Tavares, high in my search results, via the 1940 census indicating that he would have been 76 when this album was recorded — more than a little inspiring by itself, assuming that’s the case. Hippies moved to Maui in the late 60s and I can’t help but remember our interview with now Australian-based synth maven Ariel Kalma, in particular how he described Maui when he built his studio there in the 90s… saying that he relocated because friends recommended the atmosphere, recalling a heyday in the 80s and earlier. Presumably Frank Tavares was some party to that atmosphere.
>>> Stream Excerpt: Haku – “Manok” <<<
Ne Mele A Ka Haku is cosmopolitan by design, often joyously psychedelic, and surprisingly original: “theater pieces and songs” to honor Hawaii’s multi-ethnic culture, according to EM, who emphasize that Tavares “avoided many . . . standard musical tropes, choosing to build his own studio and make all the music on synthesizers, a first for Hawaii.” That gap is a match for a whole range of typically Hawaiian sounds, so the specifics of the trans-Pacific heritage it explicitly tries to elaborate can still be ambiguous, at least depending on how you hear the album, and listening superficially to the first instance of the album’s many central vocal elements can be particularly disorienting. Titled “(Story) King Kal. and Mr. Emp.,” the track is the album’s fourth and longest entry, describing a real visit (circa 1880) between Hawaii’s last reigning monarch King Kalākaua and Japan’s Emperor Meiji, littered with lampooning orchestral synths and accented English, spoken in the manner of English speakers pretending to be Japanese speaking English — that is to say, a stellar graveyard of high-gravity Rs. Admittedly the delicacy of the speech at times and an otherwise disjointed narrative may indicate a more complicated intention, particularly if the track communicates any sense of the how the piece might actually have sounded in performance.
It’s followed by one of the album’s most overt picturesques, a psychedelic minuet called “Manok,” opened by samples arranged to evoke chicken calls (manok is a south-east Asian chicken preparation popular in Hawaii) while Tavares’ synths begin to resemble strings for the first time. The consequent reverie is also the album’s closest brush with traditional expectations of “Hawaiian music” as overarchingly relaxed and nostalgic. I’m under-qualified to really compare much of Haku with Japan’s western-influenced ryūkōka music, but his treatment with the aforementioned westernizing rulers seems to imply that he would have been as much interested in avoiding that matrix as he was what he saw as “standard” approaches.
>>> Stream Excerpt: Haku – “Ho’omana’o (Remember Song)” <<<
An earlier track, “Hawaii Pono’i” references the Hawaiian national anthem, written by none other than King Kalākaua. The original’s music, composed by a Prussian band leader in Kalākaua’s court, is heavily modeled on the anthems of prominent Western states — though its language and references to the Hawaiian monarch mean its contemporary use as the state’s anthem is seen as a link to Kalākaua’s time and the nation’s past sovereignty. In Tavares’ “Hawaii Pono’i” bright synths are used to mimic the original’s fundamentally Western melody, bombastic and sweet, with a cascade of even brighter, short-fuse effects thrown in at the end to (explicitly) evoke fireworks. Bearing in mind his musical intentions for these compositions — that is, to avoid conventionally “Hawaiian” sounds — alongside the fact that Kalākaua is noted for his patronage of music and the ukulele in particular, suggests that Tavares’ personal politics here may have been genuinely complicated.
The greater part of the album rests on modulated synth and vocal juxtapositions, generally relaxing and often downright sleepy – the reverie of a track like “Manok” is far from isolated – but with a sonic depth and dimension that further suggests Tavares had more than a little experience of stagecraft. “Na’u, Ke Kukuna O Ka La” references a traditional chanting game sung as the sun’s reflection sets in pools of water, and so the track encapsulates the melodrama of what I imagine is typical of Hawaiian sunsets, drawn out in thick organ-synth drones and shot through with rippling effects. The album’s closing tracks are centerpieces of its truly Hawaiian character, both long songs sung in Hawaiian. “Ho’omana’o,” translated as “Remember Song” in a parenthetical in EM’s notes, follows first like a somber carousel melody, though it eventually reveals a new and darker, more mournful edge. By contrast, “Mamina (Regretful)” features some of the album’s most delicate synth-work, embracing a sort of inverted nostalgia at the album’s end. Regardless of the extent to which listeners might locate Ne Mele A Ka Haku‘s value purely in its novelty, the impression is of a devoted and considered work — one that easily holds up even as such.
