Disquiet Junto Project 0492: Kintsugi Rework
The Assignment: Employ the Japanese technique of mending broken ceramics as a metaphor for remixing.

Step 1: This week’s project explores the ceramic method called “kintsugi.” If the term is unfamiliar, read up on it a bit. Here’s a description from an article in the Washington Post: “That means ‘golden joinery’ in Japanese, and it refers to the art of fixing broken ceramics with a lacquer resin made to look like solid gold. Chances are, a vessel fixed by kintsugi will look more gorgeous, and more precious, than before it was fractured.”

Step 2: Consider how kintsugi can be employed, through metaphor, as a means to rework/remix an existing piece of music.

Step 3: Take an existing track, perhaps one of your own, and by some means “break” it.

Step 4: Take the “broken” piece of music from step 3 and make it whole by employing a musical adoption of kintsugi.

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Track notes:

I took a piece of music I'd recently made to simply practice key changes on guitar and keyboards. It's a fairly relaxed jazz styled track with piano, Rhodes keyboard and an electronic drum pulse.

I 'broke' it by recording the whole track to a reel on my Morphagene module, which can do all manner of granular manipulation to audio. 

My process of 'kintsugi' consisted of taking the output of the Morphagene and feeding it through a couple of slow sweeping LPF's and then a dual looping delay. The parameters of the Morphagene are also controlled by slow rate LFOs. Rather than let the whole thing drift along, I applied a bit of hands-on steering of the sonic narrative. 

The reconstruction renders the original track into a ghostly echo of its previous incarnation, full of broken lines, discontinuities and unexpected harmonies. 

I imagined a beautifully reconstructed black bowl, lines with discrete veins of gold, glimmering in a dusk as the sun sets.

Disquiet[0492] - Dusk Glimmer

Tristan Louth-Robins is a South Australian artist working principally in the medium of sound art and field recording. Ideas of sound and its signification are key elements in Louth-Robins' practice, traversing the space between the visual and aural his work is realised through the mediums of recordings, installation, visual art and performance. He is interested in sound and its associative implications - including its relationship to objects, technology, urban space, memory and the natural world. 


Since 2005, Louth-Robins has presented work in Australia and internationally as a solo artist, whilst also collaborating with artists, writers, researchers, musicians and performers. 

Working across a vast array of activities encompassing composition, sound design, installation art, field recording and workshops, his work has been featured in events such as the Adelaide Festival of Arts (2006), The National Regional Arts Festival (2012), Mildura-Wentworth Arts Festival (2013), Fairfax Festival (2013) and Adelaide Fringe Festival (2014); and selected works exhibited at galleries including The Australian Experimental Art Foundation (2009), SASA Gallery (2012, 2015), Light Square Gallery (2012) and FELT Space (2015). His audio works have been broadcast on radio including Radio National, Classic FM, The BBC (UK), Acoustic Frontiers (USA) and RBB (Germany).