For one reason or another I barely play video games anymore. I suppose hobbies that I have merely for the sake of fun have slowly been whittled down to a couple of television shows. I’m not sure If I still miss it that much. However, this is not to say that all my time playing video games was spent in vain. Often I had an endorphin-releasing glee that competes with that of music or a particularly well-crafted poem. One of those games was a simple Japanese game for the Playstation 2, entitled ‘Katamari Damacy’. The aim of the game is simple. The king of the cosmos got drunk and dirtied up the universe, getting rid of some starts. Your job as prince is to roll a big ball around and collect junk and then the king, if he likes the size, sends the thing into space. It wasn’t the concept alone that made the game endless fun, it was its incredibly deep and well-produced soundtrack and quirky art-direction that made it border-line art. Elements of Glitch, hip-hop, orchestral music, it was really wonderful.

Kawasaki’s pleasantly packaged, limited 3-inch CD brings back, in its lulling guitar-glitch subtlety, the times I would let the ambient menu music of Katamari Damacy just sort of entrance me, the innocent prince and his friends roaming around the interactive main screen. This tiny EP is a brief 9 minutes, severed rather arbitrarily into four movements: ‘Plouf’, ‘Poche’, ‘Cloudlet’, ‘Fossette’. These titles evoke something marshmallow-y and soft but it sort of belies some the crisp, sharp acoustic guitar trippings and crystalline near-percussion going on. It reminds me a little bit of The Books during their softer moments. These 9 minutes don’t build up to anything particularly memorable, and hopefully this is just a taste of what Kawasaki has to offer. Really, ‘Sing Me a Song’ doesn’t seem to be much more than a tiny reverie, a brief ten minute break from the day. But since I don’t have the leisure to stare lazily at the menu screen of a quirky Japanese video game, I need whatever break I can get. 7/10 -- John Ganiard (3 December, 2008)