Hans Tutschku is the German composer whose Firmament (2015) release for this label we quite enjoyed, especially ‘Issho Ni’ with its mosaic-like assemblage of voices from around the world making a very optimistic and utopian “global unity” statement in sound.
Today’s record Remembering Japan (empreintes DIGITALes IMED 22180) is an hour-long suite presented in five separate parts. It might not be so directly idealistic as ‘Issho Ni’, but it does represent the composer’s attempt to engage with Asian culture and communicate with its society, while still pursuing his own compositional interests. He stayed there for three months in 2014, not only working and improvising with other musicians, but also capturing a goodly bundle of field recordings in his basket. It’s interesting that he didn’t draw any lines – nature, culture, religion, ceremony, and daily life in Japan were all of equal interest to him, and this is reflected in the broad sweep of the record. On each of the five parts, which all carry subtitles, he’s attempting a different electroacoustic experiment; ‘Expansion’ for instance works with large open spaces and vast distances, while ‘Abstraction’ is more focussed on making transformations to the sounds, sometimes leaning towards “extreme forms” as he calls it. At all times he’s trying to move us through time and space, bringing together these remote and separated parts of the continent and looking for overlapping conceptual areas that join things together. Some of the keywords of interest in his text include “calm”, “dreaming”, and “peaceful” – but, as the listener will find, the peaceful mood is very often disrupted and troubled.
‘Abstraction’ is probably the most exciting piece for rock music and extreme noise fans – it sits in the very centre of the suite, uses a lot of rapid edits and fast-moving rhythms, and generally seeks to tap into the essence of what I can only assume is the pulsating energy of Japanese life. Yet it still feels oddly distant and detached, as if Tutschku wasn’t especially moved or affected by what he saw. There’s not much trace of humanity, or even animal life, in these fragmented glimpses. Quite different, and in some ways more successful, is the lengthy ‘Suspension’ piece which follows, where without reflecting anything specific about the country, the composer proposes to record his impressions in what, for him, is intended as an oasis of calm. Interestingly in this case, “calm” doesn’t equate to a completely untroubled state of mind, and the contrasting tones do generate mild sensations of apprehension and uncertainty. Barely a single recognisable sound source to be found on this ‘Suspension’; his electroacoustic changes have been particularly profound, and the piece may be a very strong example of what he regards as key to his working method, using the notions of “memory” and “space” as the way he will structure the work.
In short, it seems the word “Remembering” in the title is doing most of the heavy lifting; perhaps this record is more about Tutschku’s internal mental workings than about the country of Japan. From 14 November 2022.