Tujiko Noriko’s PON: A Fragment of Grief and Domestic Sound on Editions Mego

Tujiko Noriko has been an outlier on Editions Mego from the start. When Peter Rehberg and Christian Fennesz found her demo tapes in 2000, the label was shaped by the harsh digital processing of PITA, General Magic, and Farmers Manual. Her debut Shojo-Toshi arrived as something else entirely—melodic, cloud-like, and disarmingly human. Since then, across more than 20 albums and collaborations with Rehberg, Nobukazu Takemura, and Lawrence English, she has built a quiet but singular body of work.

PON, her sixth album for Editions Mego, is dedicated to a cat she adopted as an infant—born deaf, later lost to an accident. That loss sits at the record’s center, not as concept but as emotional framework. The music moves between childlike wonder and something more obscure, threading grief through domestic texture.

The sound sits in a precise register, somewhere between the handcrafted intimacy of Björk’s Vespertine and the fragile, laptop-deformed pop of The Internal Tulips. Tiny electronic artifacts and micro-sounds flicker at the edges; motifs surface and dissolve. The opener moves slowly, pulling the listener into a space that rewards headphones and punishes distraction. On “Kikoeru Pon,” samples of a child’s voice blend with field recordings—water, household noise, the presence of the animal itself—before Noriko’s own vocal enters. “Sneezing” foregrounds production detail that feels tactile, almost visual.

There is no grand statement here, no shift in direction. Instead, Noriko deepens a language she has refined over two decades, turning personal material into something precise and unforced.