Ez Minzoku (Japanese for "Easy Ethnic") is a studio album by Japanese electronic music producer Takahide Higuchi, known in the United States as Foodman. Two tracks on the album, "Mid Summer Night" and "Minzoku," are from a previous record by Foodman titled Are Kore (2013). Ez Minzoku is a "MIDI glitch" record (categorized as such by Higuchi) that follows the same experimental style of Higuchi's other releases and consists of minimal arrangements of clean MIDI instruments such as horns, woodwinds, and human samples. It was released on May 13, 2016 by Orange Milk Records and Noumenal Loom to favorable reviews from critics and landed on numerous year-end lists. Background The style of Ez Minzoku was inspired by Takahide Higuchi's experience of performing a J-pop MIDI file through a PC music sequencer. The sequencer had a glitch where it assigned notes to the wrong sound source. According to Higuchi, this led him to have an "awful" yet "tremendous" feeling from listening to the corrupted version of the song, which inspired him to create a "MIDI glitch" record. According to Higuchi, the album is about easily making music based on someone's "most primitive self" and the relationship between Nyabinghi music and footwork. Two tracks that appear on Ez Minzoku, "Mid Summer Night" and "Minzoku," was first on a record Foodman previously released with Dubliminal Bounce in 2013 titled Are Kore. They were placed on Ez Minzoku as instructed by Orange Milk leader Keith Rankin. Higuchi was initially reluctant to put them on the album since they didn't match the style of the other songs. However, he later decided to add them to give the album a bit of variety. Orange Milk Records originally planned to release Ez Minzoku in 2015, shortly after the distribution of Foodman's mini-album Cloudwork (2015). However, the making of the album was completed much later than planned, leading it to be released on May 13, 2016. Composition Ez Minzoku is the least dance-tinged release in Takahide Higuchi's discography. As Orange Milk Records' press release stated, Ez Minzoku involves Takahide Higuchi using the "adventurous" production he incorporated in his previous works to execute a "negative space minimalis[t]" style consisting of clean MIDI instruments. Journalist Andrew Ryce compared the album's use of bright and "naive" textures to the works of PC Music. The album's "MIDI glitch" structure is most apparent on the closing track "Rock," where a laughing snippet is