Here I am trawling through my unzipped files and this absolute gem lies hiding. Or truthfully, momentarily forgotten. Its released through RVNG, who have pleasured and excited my ears through the music of Bing & Ruth, Julia Holter and Smith & Ciani - that only scrapes the tip of what RVNG has to offer. Blues Control and Laraaji, Meredith Monk, the FRKWYS imprint are other delights to be found within this labels aural pleasure factory.
Sugai Ken's music blends musique concrete, sound design, location recordings, sampling and music into a nocturnally inspired rearrangement of musical tradition, folklore and memory. Familiar sounds are manipulated, tricked and reconfigured resulting in a kind of aural refraction. The closest musical approximates I might mention are musician/producer Brian Ales, Banabila & Machinefabriek's projects. In keeping with these touchstones, while the music is not "pure ambient" per-se, it certainly has a degree of silence and spaciousness - if sometimes only momentarily. Another common thread connecting these musicians is a kind of ethnographic approach to creating music, with Kens advantage as being an "insider", at least as far as Japanese musical tradition is concerned.
The album opens with Wakihi, which sounds as if one is contained within a giant virtual suikinkutsu chamber where digital water drops are enhanced by an occasional distant sub-sonic thud and random ether whisps. This segues to the whirring entrance of the treated marimba sonorities of Wochikaeri to Uzume, where scrambled vocal samples and various percussion and percussive sounds meld and overlay particularly effectively. A frogs call makes the mix too. Shinobine enters ambient territory with it's location recording of various animals and white noise, interrupted by the rush and pass of cars. The track passages into the strange gong and associate timbres of Okera. The sounds all seem to stand apart as individual voices within the music of UkabazUmorezU and by Okera, a nocturnal environment is well and truly established. Space and silence envelope this music, exaggerating the sound of Kens rich, imaginative re-interpretations. There's absurdity too, particularly on Ganoubyoshi with its mangled vocal that sounds as if it is lifted from a surrealist Kyogen act featuring a caricatured old man who's a touch mad. So too weird vocals echo through the disjointed, Sawariyinagi, inspired by the Japanese willow woman nature spirit, Yanagi-Onna, it is the closest one can get to finding oneself in an aural hall of mirrors - which is odd, as I find willow trees rather lovely and wistful. There it is again, another creative reinterpretation of reality.
By album's end Sugai Ken has taken one on a thoroughly engaging trip into a re-imagined world of Japanese folklore and a whole lot more.
The album opens with Wakihi, which sounds as if one is contained within a giant virtual suikinkutsu chamber where digital water drops are enhanced by an occasional distant sub-sonic thud and random ether whisps. This segues to the whirring entrance of the treated marimba sonorities of Wochikaeri to Uzume, where scrambled vocal samples and various percussion and percussive sounds meld and overlay particularly effectively. A frogs call makes the mix too. Shinobine enters ambient territory with it's location recording of various animals and white noise, interrupted by the rush and pass of cars. The track passages into the strange gong and associate timbres of Okera. The sounds all seem to stand apart as individual voices within the music of UkabazUmorezU and by Okera, a nocturnal environment is well and truly established. Space and silence envelope this music, exaggerating the sound of Kens rich, imaginative re-interpretations. There's absurdity too, particularly on Ganoubyoshi with its mangled vocal that sounds as if it is lifted from a surrealist Kyogen act featuring a caricatured old man who's a touch mad. So too weird vocals echo through the disjointed, Sawariyinagi, inspired by the Japanese willow woman nature spirit, Yanagi-Onna, it is the closest one can get to finding oneself in an aural hall of mirrors - which is odd, as I find willow trees rather lovely and wistful. There it is again, another creative reinterpretation of reality.
By album's end Sugai Ken has taken one on a thoroughly engaging trip into a re-imagined world of Japanese folklore and a whole lot more.
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