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Pauline Oliveros & Miya Masaoka Many unlikely and also very beautiful sonorities have come out of the Deep Listening label, and this time we enjoy a combination of koto and accordion. Pauline Oliveros explains her views on the recordings: “Though an unlikely combination […] it is not so much about the instrument as about the energies of the music that comes from the intensity of listening – listening as close to ‘now’ as possible. We know that our consciousness is delayed by a fraction of a second that the brain interprets as now – however the body is instantaneous in its perception. Thus the phenomena of playing and becoming conscious of what has played – been played – is a continually surprising experience in such improvisation.” Oliveros and Masaoka had played together for the first time in 2004, while both teaching at Bard College’s MFA Program. They have been holding off these recording sessions for Miya Masaoka’s pregnancy and birth of her son, and in that time their improvisational expectations may somehow have matured into the surprisingly fully-fledged and quite brilliant music laid down on this phonogram. The recordings were made in the Bard College Recording Studio. Pauline Oliveros is one of the best-known composers and artists of our day, so I’ll limit the biographic notes to Miya Masaoka, citing the label info leaflet: “Miya Masaoka, musician, composer, performance artist, has created works for koto, laser interface, laptop and video and written scores for ensembles, chamber orchestras and mixed choirs. In her performance pieces she has investigated the sound and movement of insects, as well as the psychological responses of plants, the human brain, and her own body. Within these varied contexts of sound, music and nature, her performance work emphasizes the interactive, live nature of improvisation, and reflects an individual, contemporary expression of Japanese gagaku aural gesturalism.” Track 1. Daybreak: Akegarasu (sound of a crow) [12:51] This really has something about daybreak about it, right off, as you smoothly sail in on an awareness of semi-transparence and bleak light, sound-painting thin mist and a rising consciousness; at first with softly wheezing, light hands-on string caresses and then in lightly dancing, swaying koto chords, after a little while seasoned with a waking chirping in the accordion, getting livelier by the minute, but still progressively, gradually, by and by introducing a wider range of expression, a wider dynamics and more varied sonorities and rhythms. Masaoka’s koto treatment hints at the avantgardeous, alternative playing on other instruments, like the double bass, in deep, growling and buzzing vibrations, hypnotically droning, in the vein of some of Iancu Dumitrescu’s spectral musical meditations in Bucharest and Paris, particularly in double bass soloist Fernando Grillo’s explorations in pieces like Harryphonies (alpha & epsilon) on Edition Modern. The circling, spiraling, rubbing vibrato continues, and merges the koto and the accordion in one long extension, which is embellished by pinching points, by gnats and black flies on the perimeters ahead, or by the irregular placements of swallows on the everlasting telegraph wires of old Australia. Events cool down like day heat at nightfall inside the music, as koto sounds crawl absentmindedly and millimeterish like small insects along some time-space curvature, and the accordion emits thin, sharp rays of light from inside some chemical process of sounding matter. Deep, brown clay sounds from the koto is crisscrossed by the accordion’s black barbed wire voice, or perhaps it’s the other way around. Oliveros and Masaoka are pressing tight sound into space, filling it with a vibrating mass of dense sonorities, every hollow place in your body and your wider environment stashed with many-colored tonalities, line-shaped and dot-formed, and satiated with audibility, as far as you ears can hear. Track 2. Forenoon: Hirumae; just before noon [24:20] Hirumae is first audibly perceived as a huge cube of space, wobbling like semi-transparent jelly, smelling of fish colors and not sticking to your fingers but attaching in a clean, non-worrisome way. Koto and accordion pick up on so many wobbly traces of energy here, that you imagine a whole space orchestra of particles and waveforms, tickling and caressing, fondling and spinning off to the sides: a wonderfully seasick music, nauseating in a floating, dancing, heaving, rolling jellyfish joy! Miya Masaoka and Pauline Oliveros surprise me a lot in Forenoon with their amazing Harry Partch orchestra feel, which usually calls for a whole orchestra of Californian Partch nausea contraptions, but which these two sorceresses let rise in richly populated soap bubble dreams inside the semi-transparency of the quivering jelly-cube of everything where it all takes place; wonderful! I’d abandon many riches for the rolling, spinning endlessness of this palpable spaciousness, misty with precious time units let loose. Bands of violent time periods hang like Milky Ways across existence towards the end of Forenoon, breaking sound and duration into jagged shreds of memorabilia in dense tonal outbreaks. A cruel tone mass closes around you like a jute cloth sack around a kitten to be drowned, and the accordion talks in the voices of the last trumpets. Track 3. Afternoon: Hirusugi [4:01] Oliveros’ accordion like a whining tanpura; Masaoka’s koto like Imrat Khan’s murmuring surbahar! The abrupt beginning is probably a mishap in the printing process, the first fraction of a second lost, but it’s of minor importance in this transforming and elevating performance, which instantly moves me into the Holy Hour of Cow Dust somewhere in the Punjab. I can’t understand why this work is so brief. If ever there was a piece of music that should last a whole CD’s worth, or rather, indeed, a DVD’s, it’s Afternoon: Hirusugi by Pauline Oliveros and Miya Masaoka. Breathtaking! Elating! Track 4. Twilight: Boshou (tolling of a bell) [19:25] The accordion a choir of ominous alarms cross the country; some unknown misfortune befalling the land, reaching into your habitat, mixing with your breathables, immersing your unstable security, invading your ears and your nose, entering your bloodstream – filling you with anguish… Simultaneously, a peaceful nursery enclosure sails these dangerous city circuits on the turned-away coziness of music box tone washes, plucked in high pitch kotoism catatonias. The accordion evolves from the danger-ridden alarm pitches to the drawn-out tutti of a chamber orchestra, while the koto dives into a frantic solo dance on the outskirts of modern contrabass jazz, the two musicians again forging a Morse alphabet of lines and dots. The koto’s intensity slowly ceases, while the accordion buzzes forth like a swarm of bees and individual bumblebees. The koto rises through the altitudes of pitch, reaching for some high-strung and lofty Malcolm Goldstein hair-thin fiddling, and what you sense is a misty pattern of thin sonic threads of various colorings being woven into a vibrant dance of a sundown Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin all across the ocean horizon where the clouds march with hunched backs. Later, when unrest again is brewing, I feel obscure rooms in big buildings fill up with faceless people reaching their hands for each other’s anatomies, at loss for languages, in need for an end to what ever has begun; people just places in space more dense than the surrounding space, while dying is just a thinning out and a attenuation of density into thinness, but nothing to worry about; just a rhythm in the room; mathematical calculations; algebra and electro-magnetic patterns, scratches on a paper. Twilight: Boshou then slowly, gradually, almost imperceptibly diminishes, calms down into a gray John Cage wheezing of intelligent acceptance and soaring breaths; all uneven anomalies finally evening out into the shapes of perfect spheres…
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