3030

Where the whir of the shutter and the hiss of central air meet minimal electronica.

Minimal electronica often seeks out its visual comlement—think of Carsten Nicolai’s conversion of audio tones into video signals, or Thomas Brinkmann’s elevation of the vinyl groove as a plastic art unto itself. So Takahashi’s 30/30 accompanies Fumiko Nozawa’s For Rent, a photo exhibition picturing empty rooms (and printed in the cd booklet). If the photos fall loosely into the vein of "new urbanism" as practiced by Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, and Kyoichi Tsuzuki, the music veers from Ryoji Ikeda’s tonal asceticism to the more plodding realm of Force Tracks-derived techno. The question hanging over it al remains: Aside from the conceit of "30 minutes for 30 rooms," what’s the deeper relationship between the photos and the soundtrack? It’s a question that may find its answer in the context of the installation, but there’s at least an emotional resonance conveyed by the recording. Not quite melancholy, it’s more like unease; the subtle dread of empty rooms and machinic sighs, an unshakable sense of doubt that nags us even—in these unstable boom times.

So Takahashi created 30/30 (30 audio pieces for 30 photographs) for the installation of "FOR RENT", a photographic series by Fumiko Nozawa in 1999. Released on Carpark late last year, the notable experimental electronic music label from New York, this body of work includes reproductions of these photographs. The series of 30 minimal and modern photographs of empty spaces, apparantly vacant and ready to be rented, is exquisitely translated into audio interperation by Takahashi. At times ear piercingly loud and high pitched, at others, ear numbingly quiet, these piece reflect the empty spaces of recently vacted rooms as elequently as the photographic reproductions. Takahashi recognizes the trace elements of the prior inhabitants, the outside forces on the space (the neighbprs, etc.), and the intrinsic sounds in a space itself here. Taking electronic bleeps, squeels, and drones and combining them with snippets of echoes of past inhabitants and the potential of the new residents, Takahashi has brought a deeper meaning to these simple, yet powerful photographs.

This is modern audio art at it's most sublime. Bringing abstractions of sound artistic and thoughtful effort elavates these pieces to a level more akin to modern art and less of raw, unbridled experimentalism. By bringing meaning to the sounds, Takahashi, along with Pan Sonic and Ritchie Hawtin, takes experimental electronic music, especially the minimalist variety, even further into the art world.

A cool release of constantly evolving experimental electronica that shifts back and forth from raster-noton-style or ryoji ikeda-style minimalism to a denser electronica sound then eventually to a more percussive experimental techno sound in one long track. Another solid experimental release from So Takahashi. Fans of Nobuzku Takemura, Ryoji Ikeda, Terre Thaemlitz, Taylor Deupree, Frank Bretschneider, and Noto should give this one a listen.

30/30 is a boldly conceptual release from Carpark. So Takahashi has scored an art exhibit, now closed, comprised of thirty photographs of empty and abandoned rooms with thirty minutes of music. 30/30 is that score, and Takahashi’s score is an extremely minimal composition designed to complement, though not precisely follow, the 30 photographs reproduced in the booklet.

Nine minutes in, on the tenth room, things build up. There is a minimal bleep and bass pulse, accompanied by a slowly moving two-note synth drone. By the eleventh room depicted (an abandoned office, with fluorescent lighting tracks stretching towards one another in the distance) this tone has unified several of the rooms. Finally, this stream gives out with the fourteenth room (13 minutes in) and collapses into a deep bass tone that illustrates what appears to be an abandoned software or video shop but looks more like, with the product removed, an abandoned factory of some kind.

Occasionally the sounds seem to bear little resemblance to the rooms illustrated, but sometimes they line up perfectly. The appearance of the abandoned video store and several empty spaces filled with natural light is accompanied by a twittery drone and wavy chords, then overlaid with sampled voices that distorted to sound as though they are being emitted by a tape deck or television left on in one of these rooms. The laughing voices seem to summon the burned remnants of a party, as a regular, if tiny, beat kicks in.

The ‘structured’ song theme reappears in the last five minutes, this time with a huffing percussive noise accompanying it. This time, the theme seems to underscore the menace in these rooms, as they appear more and more messy, with things left behind and junk the only marker of occupation. Fans of minimalism or those who want to visit the visual/audio art intersection may enjoy this, but it seems to lack some of the functionality and groove that would make one return to it repeatedly. Nevertheless, Takahashi is wisely taking the growing Carpark label into intriguing new directions.

A single, 30-minute concept piece based on a photo series (included) of 30 vacant rooms. Built from high-pitched beeps, sonar pings, and analog synths, the work is, at times, grating. At other points, it affirms Takahashi's place as one of today's most intriguing electronic artists.

mcity.fr
Ce musicien de Yokohama qui a choisi de s'exiler à New York nous avait déjà surpris avec son album Nubus de 1999 sur Carpark.

Un clone japonais de Ryoji Ikeda, c'est impensable ! Apparemment non, car les 20 premières minutes de ce disque sont dans un style microscopique, minimaliste et chirurgical. Après les sons stridents et les infra basses, on a droit à un passage ambient dans la lignée des artistes du label Childisc et ensuite à de la techno métronomique. Précisons qu'il s'agit d'un morceau de 30'30 comme l'indique le titre "30/30", mais ce n'est pas tout, car le concept va encore plus loin. So Takahashi fait ici 30 minutes de musique pour 30 pièces vides, d'où les photos de l'artiste Fumiko Nozawa représentant trente appartements sans vie dans l'épais livret. Ce musicien ouvre également une nouvelle série sur Carpark en produisant un maxi de 500 exemplaires.
-Walter Scassolini

30/30 is a 30-minute piece composed by So Takahashi to accompany an art exhibit consisting of 30 photographs of empty rooms. Given the visual subject matter, one would expect the accompanying audio to be similarly uncluttered. And is it ever. Takahashi finds the sound of a sine wave fascinating, and much of the music here is built from these base-level tones. (If you're having trouble imagining the sound of a sine wave, imagine the tone that plays over the color-bar test pattern during tests of the Emergency Broadcast System.) It doesn't get any less cluttered, harmonically speaking, than a sine wave.

In some respects, music this abstract built from sources so simple seems hard to evaluate. How varied and deep can responses to arrangements of sine waves be? My reference in that respect is the Ryoji Ikeda piece "Interference 003," which consists of nothing but slowly shifting sine waves, but manages, through the juxtaposition of tones, to be absolutely mesmerizing. Compared to that piece, 30/30 comes up far short, and much of it is as dull as it sounds on paper. So there must be some hidden science behind this kind of microtonal dissection.

Then again, "excitement" isn't really the point when you're talking about audio to accompany photographs of empty rooms. So, in another respect, 30/30 works. The CD booklet contains all 30 photographs from the exhibit (many of the empty rooms are commercial spaces, including an abandoned Blockbuster Video), and flipping through them while listening, the music makes a bit more sense. Occasionally, samples break through the purely electronic surface-- mostly bits of crowd noise, perhaps the ghosts of past visitors to these empty rooms. It's spooky when it happens, reminding me somehow of the scene in The Shining where Jack Nicholson has a conversation with the dead guests in the banquet room.

And Takahashi does seem to have a flair for dynamics. Somewhere around the nine-minute mark (like early pressings of Prince's Lovesexy, the disc consists of one long track-- just don't go fast-forward searching for another "Alphabet Street"), a warm, pulsing drone overtakes the sine wave beeps. When it disappears four minutes later, leaving behind only a 60 Hz bass tone, we get an idea of just how stark the music is. I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a little thrill out of the contrast.

Then, some time after the 24-minute mark, a techno beat folds into the mix. Just a simple thump and high-hat, naturally. As it chugs along, all the earlier sine waves return, then the drones and the samples, until the piece finally becomes downright busy. What this has to do with empty rooms is anyone's guess, but this dense sound is definitely the most interesting passage on the record. And then, after a few minutes, it ends, and we're back to the atmospheric sounds of my own empty living room. Not quite as interesting as 30/30, but close.

while I’m on the subject, I’d like to mention the carpark label out of new york. They’ve already released three excellent albums from artists marumari on the experimental breaks tip and now they’ve just released a 30 minute disc from japanese artist so takahashi titled 30/30. Written for a photo exhibit on empty spaces it’s, naturally, all about sparse, cold minimalism. Bleeps, hums, and tones randomly fire off into space as dense chords from the ether swell and fade. It gets really dope about twenty minutes in when a definable rhythm and melody actually comes through, followed by some vocal samples.