Akari is the third album from Tokyo duo Illuha. Following 2011’s debut Shizuku (12k1067) and 2013’s Interstices (12k2028), Akari takes the next artistic step for the band. While Shizuku was recorded in the US and completed separately by the artists, Interstices captured the duo creating their exceptionally detailed music together live during a Japaneses tour. Akari, in turn, is the first studio album where Illuha recorded and mixed together, throughout the entire process. The beautiful st-robo studio in Tokyo put a collection of amazing equipment at their fingertips, from vintage mics and outboard gear to a vast collection of instruments, both acoustic and electronic. Their writing sessions were numerous and long with details meticulously obsessed over for nearly a year. The result is the most bewildering music Illuha have created to date. An album swimming with the most delicately tactile sounds and instrumentation that draws the listener in with hushed, motionless attention.

While Illuha’s Corey Fuller and Tomoyoshi Date are often drawn to the most sparse notes of Rhodes and Wurlitzer electric pianos, acoustic grand piano and guitar, the breadth of instrumentation is partially what makes Akari so abosrbing. They have succeeded in creating their own universe of sound, so beautifully recorded, where each element not only has its own space but connects and interacts so fluidly with the other sounds. It is as if they are placed perfectly by nature, the compositions are fluid and organic, a far cry from anything calculated or structured. It is this open space that the music exists in which in turn defines the music itself. There is ample room to breathe within this forest of gentle tines, bubbling analogue synthesizers, clicking percussion and quiet field recordings. This is subtlety at its most refined; hushed without being saccharine, distant without being morose.

Akari is the Japanese word for light. Conceputally the duo used this word as a guide, as if they were searching through the dark, trying to keep the light alive, as if one is cradling a candle doing everything in their power to keep it alight in a storm. It is this almost visceral sense of sheltering, of protection, that gives Akari a very human and personal sound whose intensely deep focus is as impressive as it is arresting.

Akari

Structures Based on the Plasticity of Sphere Surface Tension

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Structures Based On The Plasticity Of Sphere Surface Tension

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Unknown Album

Fratii.cast #141 - Amelia

Fratii.cast #148 - Ilusorio (Own Production)

granite VA
Release: 03.03.25
Soundcloud:
https://soundcloud.com/bwart23

Bwart23 - WindWhippedWaves

Nuevo lanzamiento en camino. Desde Bélgica @ennaw__ con un EP de 5 originales que muestran un sonido dulce y profundo.

Bandcamp exclusive: 17.04

Ennaw - Golden hour in the Sun

Getting my new liveset ready for this summer.. I needed some time to get used to my new granular machine 🤖 


It’s a one tape recording from bank 3. 
Enjoy-

Micro Matic-

live impro/ 
digitakt
digitone

united by sherman

tried to do some mix bus processing with a sherman xd, result, screaming sherman sounds.

CH12

We are pleased to welcome long time friend and exceptionally talented producer Wiremüto the label for his debut Vinyl release. Expect great things from this producer over the next 18 months.

B2: Wiremü- Bonheur (Niko Maxen Remix)

Introducing the next instalment in our MNMT Events series. A sublime four hour trip with the amazing Valentino Mora, recorded at Blå in Oslo, Norway. We hope you enjoy.

Read more: https://mnmt.no/blog/2019/10/29/mnmt-events-valentino-mora-bla-oslo/

MNMT Events: Valentino Mora

Hideki Umezawa + Andrew Pekler 
"Two Views of Amami Ōshima"

Label - Edições CN 
Edition - LP, 300 copies 
Date - 20 Dec 2020
Design - Jeroen Wille
Mastering - Roman Hiele
Photo - Hideki Umezawa

https://www.edicoescn.be

- - - - - - - - - - 

In 1958 the painter Isson Tanaka (°22 July 1908 – *11 September 1977) moved to Amami Ōshima, an island in the Ryukyus. There, in self-chosen isolation, he committed himself exclusively to his art until his sudden passing in 1977. 

In 2018 Seiha Kurosawa, Kanako Azuma and Hideki Umezawa visited Amami Ōshima to create a video installation about Tanaka’s insular life. The work, entitled “Dokkyaku” (tr. The Lone Visitor), shifts between the texture and materiality of Tanaka’s paintings in relation to the natural world of Amami Ōshima and its people. The video invites viewers to understand—poetically—the artist’s sensitivity to nature and the expressivity of his works. 

During his stay on Amami Ōshima, Hideki Umezawa recorded a lot of natural sounds to recreate a sort of simulated ecology of Tanaka’s mind – or: of the painter’s mind. On this long playing record these recordings are blended with electronically generated sounds. Next, Andrew Pekler, who has never actually visited Amami Ōshima, upon hearing Umezawa’s field recordings creates - in the spirit of Isson Tanaka - a complementary dreamscape of the island’s phenomena. Of what could be. 

This is a work that doubts between site specific and creative imagination. With sounds echoing between the anecdotic and the imaginary. It is a sensitive and highly stylized interpretation of a world that Isson Tanaka had also carefully studied. A painter at work; a way of seeing. 

So, after Christophe Piette’s ‘Six Tableaux de Quelpaert’, released by Edições CN in 2019, we again moore an island in the nautical footsteps of a painter. While Piette drew a story through – among other things - recording dialogues at his island home, at the restaurant table, et al. Pekler and Umezawa paint their pictures in a more musical fashion. Where natural sounds evaporate into electronic clouds of imagination.

Dokkyaku (excerpt)

Minimal/Techno
Modular


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