MINAMO

beautiful

CD, apestaartje

Trying to combine nature and technology is an almost incomprehensible task but the four artists of Minamo, free-improvisers from Tokyo, go at it astonishingly successful and unbelievably rewarding. Instead of searching for the right sounds during recording they rather sit back and let the natural sounds of their instruments, the humming of amplifiers, the quibble of the audience, the feedback and static rustling of computers, make the music. Only at the best moment conceivable do they use their instruments, and even if they do it silently and softly, it is always to maximum effort. Musically, “beautiful” reaches as far back into music as it does into the future.

Just read the title of this record and it’ll suffice. It has to be something well japanese to use a name for a record that describes the music on it so well and nothing else. Moreover, it is almost unconceivable that this record is made up of a compilation of live improvisations, because the six track on here sound so unified, so well-thought out, so perfectly well-done. But I guess there is Asian philosophy playing a role in there as well, with artists searching for perfection in design and aesthetics that are almost unbearable for Western minds. On the other hand, this four piece from Tokyo is labelmates to Anderegg, who has produced a likewise beautiful album as an urban eremite in the most western city there is, New York. Well, Tokyo is no further down the list, maybe only downranked due to its exotic status, but really none behind any city in the world, and therefore a perfect place for any kind of fanaticism and almost insanely neurotic behaviour.

I’d like to point out my opinion, that producing music like this in live improvisations takes a lot of hard work on banging your own mind into the right setting, to be able to attune yourself completely to some delicate almost inaudible electronic noises. To wait through a series of clicks and tape-destruction noises to start up again a most fragile and tranquil music that at times flows with the beating of the human heart and at other times imitates the rise and ebb of the tides. Once again the travel leads us into a territory where the main question seems to be not “what is music?” but a step further “what makes music?” or rather “what makes me music?”. This is not an unnatural scheme and rather aloof of the pragmatic and plain theories of early industrial music. For instance, the static noises at the beginning of “conceal” are a beautiful imitation of raindrops banging against your window, while the guitar plucks chords and single notes to accompany such a melancholic moment. There is no separation between the natural and the synthetical. In the same track high frequencies, very much like scraping glass over a roughly cemented floor and unnerving to the ears of some, I am sure, take the listener out of any self-induces slumber, finally resolving the track in air-light guitars, noises receding into the back and flowing into the foreground again, a wave of sound building up, but without danger or immanence, but rather a foreboding of taking you into its corpus of sound once you your mind is ready.

There is not much music that is more concerned with pure sound, with any kind of sound than Minamo. Maybe Rowe / Ambarchi / Sachiko M / Yoshihide / Avenaim went deeper into the realm of electronically produces hummings and static reverbs than them in their "thumb"-project, but Minamos scope is more diverse and almost cinemascopic in relation. It is the naturalistic connotations and associations that make this record so astounding. The pace is glacial, the noises are pulsing like brainwaves or echoes of the wind rushing through caves, the most electronic clicks evoke a feeling of listening to night time sounds of insects and the elements playing in the woods. Pure nature indeed, and the acoustic guitar hasn’t been called one of the most natural instruments of the world for ages. The tracks themselves evolve so slowly and peacefully that it is almost impossible to follow them until suddenly you find yourself in a virtual, blasting woodfire of sound (which is usually quickly dealt with). Minamo expect a lot of mental work from their audience but imagine what their own minds are at the moment they are producing this music, or rather: electro-acoustic excursions, because these instrumentals are as intriguing and explorative to the musicians as to the audience.

www.staartje.com

07/2003