Lend Me Your Radio - Nov 20

Untitled #21

'A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth' is available at https://blankforms.org/publication/kazuki-tomokawa-a-string-of-paper-cranes-clenched-between-my-teeth-lp/, and as part of the Kazuki Tomokawa CD box set at
https://blankforms.org/publication/kazuki-tomokawa-kazuki-tomokawa-1975-1977/.

In a generation of musicians that came of age in postwar Japan, Kazuki Tomokawa stands as a pioneer of radical individualism, with a sound marked by shocking intimacy and blistering honesty. In his third album, A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth, released by Harvest Records in 1977, Tomokawa creeps “ever more inward,” as Kiichi Takahara writes in the record’s original introductory text—embracing an attitude pervasive amongst musicians of the time who interrogated the prosaic and the profound alike, eschewing politics and society in favor of an “attitude of total self-containment.”

Tomokawa recorded the album over the course of a month—from August 24 to September 25, 1977—at Tokyo’s famed Onkio Haus studio in the bustling Ginza district. The arrangements, accordingly, are amped up: paired with the Black Panther Orchestra, Tomokawa’s “screaming philosopher” vocals find their match with the orchestra’s electric guitar, bass, piano, tuba, and ground-thumping drums played by the Brain Police’s Toshi Ishizuka—who appears on Tomokawa’s first three records and remains his collaborator to this day.

“This is Kazuki Tomokawa in the flesh,” concludes Takahara. A String of Paper Cranes Clenched between My Teeth is, in Tomokawa’s uncanny way, able to cut through facade and artifice in pursuit of truth. “You call that life?” he heckles, exhausted by the melodrama and nihilism of youth counterculture, “try saying you’re alive!”

Kazuki Tomokawa (b. 1950) is a prolific singer-songwriter from Hachiryu Village (now the town of Mitane) in the Akita Prefecture area of northern Japan. Since his first release in 1975, he has recorded more than thirty albums. The 2010 documentary about his life, La Faute des Fleurs, won the Sound & Vision award at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, and that same year saw the Japanese release of the book Dreams Die Vigorously Day by Day, a collection of his lyrics spanning forty years. His most recent albums are Vengeance Bourbon (2014) and Gleaming Crayon (2016), both on the Modest Launch label.

Kazuki Tomokawa - Try Saying You're Alive!

Prism Architecture

Toull-Karr

Vlada BC

"White Eyes" is taken from "The Burrow", the upcoming duo album by Jasmine Guffond & Erik K Skodvin. Released 30th of October, 2020 on the PATTERN series by Sonic Pieces.

The album also features Merja Kokkonen on voice and comes in a laser cut sleeve.

Jasmine Guffond & Erik K Skodvin - White Eyes

I've recently discovered (at long last) the music of Danish composer Per Nørgård. He developed a compositional techniques based on what he called the "infinity series", which is a simple formula for developing a series of numbers based on an interval such as a minor second. The series takes the initial interval and then slowly expands upon it both upwards and downwards in pitch, getting broader in scope as it progresses. This idea can be used to generate melodies, rhythms, or other aspect of a composition.

I decided to try playing around with this, but applying it to microtonal intervals, using Csound and a Python script to generate the Csound score according to the series. I ended up with this brief study, which takes the first 256 terms of the series and applies it to three of my favorite intervals simultaneously:
 - 9/8 (major whole tone from the 9th harmonic)
 - 11/8 (unidecimal tritone,from the 11th harmonic)
 - 7/4 (septimal minor seventh, from the 7th harmonic)

The starting tone (240 Hz) plays throughout the piece as the other notes unfold above and below it. I used sine waves processed with a touch of tanh distortion to add a slight amount of harmonic content.

Csound and Python source code: https://github.com/DaveSeidel/music-src/tree/master/infinity-study

References:
 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_N%C3%B8rg%C3%A5rd
 - https://web.archive.org/web/20071010091253/http://www.pernoergaard.dk/eng/strukturer/uendelig/uindhold.html

Infinity Study

Quiet Evenings - Fault (excerpt)

Tuberose is out now on Bandcamp:
https://lauralunacastillowsr.bandcamp.com/

Quiet Evenings - Fault (excerpt)

Adversary