Label: Hallow Ground

モジュラーを用いた極上の擬似的サウンドスケープ!!スイスHallow Groundからは5年振りとなるソロ作!!東京出身の作曲家であり1994年からデュッセルドルフを拠点に活動、サウンドアート界の重鎮Rolf Juliusとも共作を残しているMiki Yui氏。2018年にブラジルはマナウスの熱帯雨林で体験したという現地の環境音。モジュラーシンセの音響合成がそのサウンドに驚くほど似ている事を発見し、モジュラーシンセシスの即興とランダムなプロセスで生み出した非常に緻密な構造のエレクトリック環境音。版元解説にポーリン・オリヴェロスやローリー・シュピーゲルの名が挙げられていますが、古典的な電子音楽にも通じる部分があります。







Miki Yui is a musician, artist, and composer, originally from Tokyo, who has been based in Düsseldorf since 1994. Her whose work has long explored multiple forms of media, while documenting liminal zones of perception. On her latest album, As If, Yui creates a subtly connected suite of electronic music, drawn from improvisations and randomised processes that she has engaged with modular synthesis. Deeply poetic in its expression, even at its most minimal, the six pieces on As If have a curious tenor – they are, each of them, intensely sensuous, almost haptic listening experiences, as though the laser focus that Yui displays towards her compositions allows her to engage them as almost physical presences in the world.

One of the keys that unlocks the intimate complexity-in-simplicity of As If was Yui’s encounters with the Amazonian rainforest in Manaus, Brazil in 2018. Finding that the sounds in the rainforest both shadowed and echoed the music she had been making for two decades, she embraced the possibilities of modular synthesis, the sounds of which she discovered “have astonishing similarities to the sounds I experienced in the rainforest.” There is, indeed, something natural about the way these sounds bloom in real time; in their dedicated focus to the subtle development and mutation of several discrete parameters of sound, they grow slowly, gradually, their rhizomic structures suggesting that we are always situated within the middle of sound.

Sometimes, the material here has a kind of febrile energy, as on the ticking, clacking electronics of “Generativ”, a track that seems to rotate in the air in front of the listener, the light reflecting off its multiple surfaces as we catch the intricacies of its micro-patterns. Elsewhere, we slide into a cooled but welcoming environment, like the late-night fire-fly horizon of “Song 4”; there’s also the humid, dripping tropical sunset that’s documented on “Summernight”. It’s a music that’s hard to locate external coordinates for, though there are, perhaps, some parallels with the work of Laurie Spiegel, Eliane Radigue’s Vice Versa, and Pauline Oliveros’s “Roots of the Moment”. But As If is an extraordinary collection of naturally developing, rich studies for slowly mutating, enveloping, elemental electronics.