Four Minutes That Hold Still

Perfume—the Japanese technopop trio of Kashiyuka, A-chan, and Nocchi—released "Spending All My Time" in August 2012 as their first simultaneous domestic and international single, a small landmark that signaled something opening up. Yasutaka Nakata’s production is as airless and precise as ever: vocoded harmonies stacked like architecture, a beat that doesn’t drop so much as simply appear, the three of them moving through the video with that signature blank-faced grace that reads less like performance and more like ritual. The song doesn’t build toward anything. It holds its position, perfectly, for four minutes. Then it stops. That’s enough.