Leo Okagawa
Density
ITALY DISSIPATIO DISS022 CD (2024)
Okagawa comes to us from Tokyo with this cryptic, minimal set of tones.
The term “electronic music” doesn’t help much in understanding it; it seems a lot of his work begins life as field recordings or documentary pieces, although the things he like to record are other electronic devices and machines, fascinated perhaps by their impersonal humming tones and their mechanical rhythms. These he collages and layers, perhaps adding other purely electronic sounds from his own personal boxes. These experiments, made 2020-2023, are the first I heard from this creator, and while a part of me was hoping for an update or reimagining of the seminal work of Ryoji Ikeda – whose intense, ultra-pure electronic sounds remain a benchmark of achievement for this listener, some of them amounting to an intense assault on the senses (he found a way to shock the retinas too, with his light shows) – in fact Density is not quite as agitated, nor as intent on filling every nano-second of the microscopic time scale with its insistent presence.
Even so, it’s evident that Okagawa takes a good deal of time and effort in his edits, his compressions, and his paper bundling before releasing a single one of these digital butterflies into the artificial vivarium. Every purr, murmur or growl of his pet machines – one can’t help thinking that he regards his devices as friendly domestic animals – is lovingly framed and showcased, performing its turn on stage for a brief display of preenage and hair styling, before making way for the next brief experiment. Okagawa exhibits little interest in conventional “song form”, resists development or dynamics, and though he keeps his tunes at pop-song length (2-3 mins), there is no sign of a conventional beginning or ending. Some of his titles hint, you might suppose, at some aspects of his process or his intentions – I mean ‘Saturation’ or ‘Manufacture’ or ‘Counting Clockwise’, but such terms are equally likely to have some validity or meaning to the foreman of a strange factory, where the product might be anything from an elaborate watch mechanism or a box of soap powder.
“Between tones, silences, and rhythms, [he] explored the density”, is all we can learn from the elliptical press releases emanating from Italy. Unlikely to catch the selector’s eye at the Raster-Noton label, but that’s probably a good thing; Leo Okagawa is far less aggressive, and modest, than some of the ferocious, hard-edge Europeans that swarm in that domain. (18/04/2024)