Customer Reviews

Monogatari: Amino Argot

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This is a collaborative composition with a rather interesting history. Between June and September, 1984, Otomo Yoshihide, in Tokyo, and Carl Stone, in San Fransisco, sent tapes -DAT, which I assume means "Digital Audio Tape," though I dunno -- back and forth of material they'd worked on. They used each other's material as the basis for their own compositions. The collaboration's initial thrust was provided by Otomo-san, who "made a scrap from records and CDs with (his) 4-channel hard-disk recorder," dealing with "Mao... post-communism East Asia... and big money and consumption -- Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea..." This piece, entitled "Direction of the Tale," a noisy but richly textured piece, appears first on the disk. The second cut is by Stone -- Otomo-san invited him to "use any kind of electric, acoustic or computer techniques, like remixing, sampling, loops... or additional recordings, cut-ups, slowing down or speeding up, MIDI control -- in any kind of way. I don't mind if you change it completely and I can't find my original material." The reworking not only provides the disc with its second cut, but gives Otomo-san raw material to work with, using techniques such as those he's listed, to make the third track. The booklet for the CD nicely reproduces the correspondence that accompanied the tape exchange (from which I took the above quotes). You get to hear these men thinking about each other's music and reinterpreting it, making, needless to say, very substantial changes, but remaining largely within a sort of noisy flow that reminds me in ways, though it's a completely different project, of Cage's ROARATORIO. It's intoxicating to listen to, but difficult, and not for the musically timid. Still, I recommend it -- the process is as interesting as the music, and in some ways, IS the music.