‘Retour’ by audace, a jazzy Tokyo-based two-piece featuring Shiko Ito on accordion and Manabu Kitada on clarinet, was issued as part of the duo’s debut album all the way back in 2007 – a time when a young Felix Kjellberg, then still at high school, was nary a twinkle in YouTube’s barely opened eye. In that year, without a distributor to their name, the talented Japanese instrumentalists hand-sold to members of their live audience a small pressing comprising just five-hundred discs.
Nine years hence, on the first day of the past September, the album in question, 胡蝶の夢、十の夜, was finally uploaded as a digital download to Bandcamp. Kjellberg used some of that interval to turn himself into Pewdiepie, both Sweden and YouTube’s biggest star. And thanks to his videos, ‘Retour’ has swiftly become enshrined in the popular culture, henceforth best known to the masses as the outro music to his ‘BIRDABO’ series of vlogs.
Pewdiepie was vlogging as part of a prolonged stay in Los Angeles, filming for the second season of Scare Pewdiepie compelling his visit to the United States. By the time the ‘BIRDABO’ series drew to a close, clamour among fans for the full outro music – previously played only in brief snippets – had reached fever pitch. So Pewdiepie included the whole of the composition, with link and title, as a coda over a slow burning flame at the end of the final ‘BIRDABO’.
It is easy to see why bros and casual audience members alike have embraced ‘Retour’, audace’s seven-minute opus. From the opening note, Kitada’s clarinet – soon gracefully anchored by Ito’s accordion – manages to conjure something of the same depth of sound, a sense of the same sort of timeless yearning, as achieved by Albert Ayler’s saxophone on the eternal rendition of ‘Truth Is Marching In’, live from Greenwich Village.
The piece has three distinct parts. Following the elegantly wistful opening, at 2:11 Ito begins to trill and flirt around a steady pulse. ‘Retour’ becomes a sea shanty, persistent yet playful, decidedly French. And at 4:25, after a heady drone and throb, audace provide the drop. A single drum beat and its ensuing patter allows Kitada to take a breath and lavish forth, for the boat has docked, and we roam merrily the streets and the waterfront of a new town.
The final thirty seconds offer only an echo of the old mood, not sadness but a sigh of quiet contemplation, as movement stalls and a flurry of sights dim against the backdrop of the setting sun. ‘Retour’ is a picaresque played in fragments, the epic journey of a single day’s trip, and we can thank audace for playing it for us, and Pewdiepie for showing such impeccable good taste.
