Mitchell Akiyama - Small Explosions That Are Yours To Keep

Mitchell Akiyama - Small Explosions That Are Yours To Keep
Жанр: Leftfield, Abstract, Ambient
Год выпуска диска: 2005
Производитель диска: Sub Rosa
Аудио кодек: (MP3 + FLAC)
Тип рипа: tracks+.cue
Битрейт аудио: (lossy + lossless)
Продолжительность: 53:55
Трэклист:
01. Strategies For Combatting invisibility (05:36)
02. But Promise Me (04:07)
03. Full Then Felt (06:27)
04. Your Distance Kept (04:42)
05. Through Fall And Flicker (01:54)
06. Small Explosions That Are Yours To Keep (07:18)
07. Suggestions For Walking Alone (02:54)
08. Contrapuntal Lung Apparatus (04:23)
09. Overhead Then Exit (06:14)
10. With Her Shadows Cast In Doubt (04:41)
11. Ghost Storms (05:34)

описание на английском

AMG Review by François Couture
Mitchell Akiyama's second album for the Belgian label Sub Rosa is one of his most accomplished efforts and rights all the small annoying wrongs of his previous one, down to the duration. Akiyama's soft, textured sound world demands a certain time for the listener to immerse in it and revel in the ambiguity between acoustics and electronics that is at the core of his art — and the 35 minutes of If Night Is a Weed and Day Grows Legs were insufficient in that regard. In contrast, this album consists of 11 pieces segued into two suites (which would be quite suitable for an LP release). Running from the opener, Strategies for Combating Invisibility, down to the title track, the first suite is the richest and most dynamic. It also features very diverse instrumentation, from strings (always playing a key role in Akiyama's music) to harmonica, acoustic guitar, banjo, double bass, and handclaps — the latter three being found in particular in the lively But Promise Me, a clear highlight. The second suite adopts a smoother, more homogeneous form that seems to indicate that the artist is tempted by longer formats. Digital cut-ups, stutters, and deconstructions intervene here and there, at times building bridges between tracks, in other places short-circuiting tunes that are starting to feel too comfortable. Also the crux of Akiyama's work, this delicate yet invasive digital pollution is paradoxical. On the one hand, he is obviously a gifted composer (his naïve melodies are endearing and his arrangements are creative) who could draw a crowd simply by writing acoustic instrumentals. On the other hand, his deconstructions prevent the music from becoming stale or predictable. So is he a subversive artist or a composer who can't recognize his true talent? In any case, Small Explosions That Are Yours to Keep provides a very emotional listen.
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On his debut album of Hope That Lines Don't Cross, Mitchell Akiyama created a minimal electronic release that gurgled with touches of the Chain Reaction label and echoed different artists doing similar things. Over the course of his following releases, Akiyama has really stretched out and broken into new territory, exploring the fine line between electronic and organic music. In addition to creating his own music, he's also started and runs the label Intr.Version, which has released a slew of great releases by everyone from The Beans to Desormais (a side-project of Akiyama's).
If his last few albums saw him moving towards a certain point, Small Explosions That Are Yours To Keep definitely feels like the realization of a goal. On this release, Akiyama recorded compositions and improvisations for piano, strings, gamelan, and other instruments, then took those recorded pieces and ran them through the digital blender. The result is something that perhaps oddly still feels very organic, despite stumbling and shifting through digital realms at times.
Akiyama actually started off his musical career with a jazz background, and this is one of his first releases that actually feels like it has the living and breathing movements of jazz, even if it's not using the same instrumentation. Strategies For Combating Invisibility opens the release with repetitive chimes that eventually build into a pattern as strings struggle to break free of digital processing and the track flourishes about halfway through. But Promise Me builds in a much different way as upright bass strums mingle with flickering electronics, slowly building strings and more chimes before the whole thing finally locks in place for an almost upbeat and melodic section complete with layered handclaps.
The title of the release is actually quite apt for the release, as it never really bursts forth in a loud or overwhelming way but instead consistently creates great little moments where the organic instrumentation blends seemlessly with digital manipulation. Although the album loses focus a bit in places (the long Overhead Then Exit is especially guilty), for the most part the release succeeds because Akiyama has started with compositions that are in and of themselves at least partially interesting and doesn't completely rely on digital manipulations to make them so. Instead, the filtering and electronics added to the release serve as sort of a unique touch that helps to add dynamics to the already-interesting instrumentation. Several steps beyond his debut, Akiyama is proving himself to be an adventuresome artist.
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If a photograph can claim to depict a tree, a digital photograph can invent that same tree. The tree’s existence outside the frame of the photograph can never be confirmed. Small Explosions never claims the tree exists, nor does it attempt to build a real tree from ones and zeroes, but its brooding instrumental sketches – heavily processed and rearranged to form coherent compositions – suggest musical events that have never occurred, arrangements never actually played. On the title track, a stark accordion figure traces a percussive loop reminiscent of Steve Reich: it deliberately accrues eighth notes until the song, saturated, graciously tips its hat and bowls over.
Mitchell Akiyama, known for electronic deconstructions of traditional music, leaves the imprint of that fragmentation a little further behind this time around, sacrificing tension for the melodrama of reconstruction. It’s an act that may be too convincing, inasmuch as Small Explosions tries to capture some of the emotional immediacy of a chamber orchestra, an expectation from which computer musicians have been more or less freed.
Not that Akiyama should be chastised for donning those chains again. While the pieces here are often beholden to a concrete reference point – breathing, room sounds, and the ubiquitous bird calls situate the sounds in a space that, while not real in the strictest terms, is still familiar; they regularly achieve a sublime elegiac quality. On “Your Distance Kept,” long-dead guitar melodies are resurrected by echoing bells, sustained across a haze of bending strings.
But even these sounds, guitars and saxophones processed to the brink of illegibility, now sound familiar within the idiom of computer music. There’s a slightly Gothic historicism behind those layers, but without the dim witticism and Dionysian drawl of other, more playful collagists. The typical tropes of ambient electronic music gather as if for a summit: modulated bells, crackling soundscapes, murky but reverberant synth tones. But the incorrigible languor of these effects is matched by a somber commitment to rhythm. The subtly uptempo barn stomp of “But Promise Me,” hand claps and all, recalls Bela Bartok’s primitive-modern compositions.
If this were a fireworks show, the explosions would occur in 10-minute intervals, with no finale, only withdrawal. The exit, “Ghost Storms,” is marked eloquently by a lethargic chorus and strings coupled to form three notes that are sustained just long enough to trace one another in a glissando. Having made the grandiloquent statement of fallng into one another, they disappear.
By Alexander Provan
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Film theorist Christian Metz proclaimed some four decades ago that “every film is a fiction film.” Though Metz was concerned with the “impression of reality” specific to cinema, his aphorism might just as easily be applied to contemporary music; the relationship between fiction and non-fiction film is not so different than the so-called “tension” between electronic and organic music. The disparity b