Radical Fragility

Abstract

Radical Fragility Jeff Gburek Improvised Music from Japan 2005 Edited by Yoshiyuki Suzuki Translated by Cathy Fishman Improvised Music from Japan http://www.japanimprov.com 128 pages; paper with two CDs, Price N/A The first CD starts with a funky, syncopated grid of electronic samples labeled "#460" by PsysEx and feels, technologically speaking, up-to-date. It might as well thump a subwoofer in any Berlin or Tokyo noise party. But I wonder what makes it "Japanese"? With global technologies making the cultural corridor between East and West ever shorter (if narrower), I am not surprised the accompanying text by the artist refers to collecting records put out by Raster Noton, a German group pumping out some of the slickest Euro-electronica. The next track by Jio Shimizu, "One Million Dots," sounds like a recording of a crowded train station filtered through a tremolo effect. The length ofeach stuttered sound successively becomes shorter while the silence in between grows longer: a scatter of blips panning rapidly across the speakers. The crowd of voices disappears in a series of tiny, fluttering digital snapshots that eventually elongate again and become recognizable as the previous train station. This round-trip ticket into and out of the shimmery bardo pond of representation/abstraction reveals not only the power ofthe medium to manipulate information but also an infinitesimal minutae underlying the depiction of reality: the millions who flutter through Shinjuku station every hour. Already by the third track I am convinced this publication documenting the inimitable Improvised Music from Japan label is a great gift to us all. The piece by Tetsuya Umeda employs piano and portable radio static, a sensitive balance between two devices that combines the abandon of formal constraints we might associate with naïve art and a sense of spontaneous restraint. I might even venture that this naive simplicity and surgical control displays cultural traits we might consider uniquely postwar Japanese; namely, "the strategy of being radically fragile" outlined by Seigo Matsuoka and the "absolute contradictory self-identity" of Kyoto philosopher Kitaro Nishida, which are described in Tatsumi's Full Metal Apache, reviewed in this issue ofABR. The piece by Umeda also illustrates that the use of noise and trash ("recyclable"), materials not traditionally considered to be musical, are as readily at the disposal of these sound artists as are cellos or other musical machines used in unconventional ways, such as Toshimaru Nakamura's "no-input mixing board," where a feedback loop generates a constant electronic signal that can be transformed precisely by minute adjustments of the equalizer's controls. Nakamura's work being the subject of a feature article leads us inevitably to consider more closely the book supporting these two CDs. Improvised Musicfrom Japan 2005 is a yearin -review publication that sums up via interviews, articles , and CD reviews what editor Yoshiyuki Suzuki feels are the most interesting releases and attitudes of Japanese sound artists. It is a valuable resource not only for examining and displaying current musical ideas but also for discerning the historical outline of Japanese improvised and experimental music, as" it also documents current rereleases of older music, clueing one into over thirty years of daring and innovation , so much of which, like its counterpart in the West, is swamped in mass-market music and in danger ofbeing forgotten even as it is born. The book is bilingual English and Japanese, contains profiles of labels, and tells you where to go in Kyoto for experimental music concerts and galleries. This, like every volume of IMJ, contains two CDs filled with music of astounding variety. The sounds in this volume run from the wild musique concrete ofTomomi Adachi's "tomoring"—with all the rawness and constructive awareness of Pierre Henry — to the eerie and soft synthetic pop ofCinngirls, the spareness ofToshihiro Koike's trombone, the delicate, granular munching of laptop duo VOIMA, and all the way over again to the unwashed electronic violence of Merzbow's excerpt from "Death of 250,000 Chickens." This music does not accept technologies blindly but actually deconstructs and evolves through intense personalization the human-machine relationship. Among the numerous new CDs featured in this volume, I need to mention the...