Two CDRs from the small Japanese label Kirigirisu Recordings. Both arrived 14 June 2023.
Minor House with compelling and modest CDR of unusual music called Outside The House in Kanazawa (kgr039). Minor House are (or were) a duo of keyboard and electric guitar and this is an outdoor recording made by Asuna Arashi. He did it with an old karaoke machine tape deck he found in the trash. The instruments were line-in, so we can’t actually hear the outdoor sounds of the fish market, the underground station, or other bustle in the city of Kanazawa, but they are still going on (sort of – see qualification below), and these actions of indifferent citizens somehow impact on the gentle music here. The credits here are Musika-nt on keyboard and Kaitsubu on guitar. I think this happened some years ago in 2015 and the band may have drifted apart now. Asuna may have appeared on Lucky Kitchen in 2003, but there’s plenty more examples of his sound art craft on many small labels, and he’s been active in Tokyo experimental music scenes since the end of the 1990s. The whole record is just lovely. It’s not just beautiful music beaming in from the recent past, but seems to be taking place on another world, a lost paradise where the air is sweet and the water is wild. The locations, and the times when the music were made, indicate that they did it at night or at closing time, or other hours when the city was deserted or nearly deserted and people were going home. This too adds to the impressions of an imminent paradise that might exist in the past or in the future, or is otherwise accessible to us if we just know where to look. Happy to slip into this other gentle dimension, through the door of Minor House. Only 40 copies made; long since sold out.
On Tuxford Fumble (kgr038), our favourite Canadian innovator Tim Olive gets down and dirty with his shortwave radio, and his typical magnetic pickups and spring reverb – devices which he uses to affect the polarity of the globe, transform objects into living creatures, and breed insects that can reverse climate change once released in sufficient numbers to swarm across the skies. The cover image seems to depict a man water-skiing, except the background is crazed like an old Renaissance wall-painting, and his activities have caused him to turn into negative-man like from an episode of The Outer Limits. The strange music of Olive can, I make no idle boast, sometimes bring about unexpected physical changes such as these. The “Tuxford fumble” refers of course to a particular move in American football, of which our man Olive is an adept, here transposed into musical actions with great success. As ever with Olive’s music, we always get the sense of genuine experimentation and genuine adventure; the outcome, if indeed any outcome is intended, is never a foregone conclusion, and he explores these unknown avenues wishing to find out what lays at the other end. Even a potential cul-de-sac turns into a gateway to a nature reserve, all hurdles in the way instantly receding into the pavement at the flick of a switch. Also sold out immediately upon issue, as did the 20-copy repress.