This cd opens with precise but soft sky high harmonic fuzzy melodic voicings and treated field recordings, one of which sounded like a very soft filtered jetplane. Tomoyoshi Date and Chihei Hatakeyama combine electric and acoustic guitars, piano, electronics and bass in a fairly glitch free collection of landscape sound portraiture. Although this is sloppy to say, since their cd’s contents read more like a list of more cropped, and at times conceptual (‘a white cloth falling from the snow branches’) images.
This may be nostalgia or reverence, for example, and it is a question of belief in so much as how far we go along with the story….I am reminded of Brian Eno’s early work on the EG label, for example ‘On Land’ ( 1982 ) or with Robert Fripp on ‘Evening Star’ ( 1975 ).
Liner notes to ‘On Land’ :
“ This record represents one culmination of that development ( studio created music ) and in it the landscape has ceased to be a backdrop for something else to happen in front of: instead, everything that happens is a part of the landscape. There is no longer a sharp distinction between foreground and background.
In using the terms landscape I am thinking of places, times, climates and the moods that they evoke. And of expanded moments of memory too…One of the inspirations for this record was watching Fellini’s “Amarcord” ( “I remember” ), a presumably unfaithful reconstruction of childhood memories. Watching that film, I imagined an aural counterpart to it, and that became one of the threads woven into the fabric of this music.
What qualified a piece for inclusion on the record was that it took me somewhere, but this might be somewhere that I’d never been before, or somewhere I’d only imagined going to. Lantern Marsh, for example, is a place only a few miles from where I grew up in East Anglia, but my experience of it derives from not having visiting it (although I almost certainly did) but from having subsequently seen it on a map and imagining where and what it might be. We feel affinities not only with the past, but also with the futures that didn’t materialise, and with other variations of the present that we suspect run parallel to the one we have agreed to live in.
The choice of sonic elements in these pieces arose less from listening to music than from listening to the world in a musical way.………Listening in this way, I realised that I had been moving towards a music that had this feeling: as the listener, I wanted to be situated inside a large field of loosely-knit sound, rather than placed before a tightly organised monolith ( or stereolith, for that matter ). I wanted to open out the oral field, to put much of the sound a considerable distance from the listener ( even locating some of it ‘out of earshot ) and to allow the sounds a to live their lives separately from one another, clustering occasionally but not ‘musically’ bound together…….
As I made these pieces, I began to take a different attitude towards both the materials and the procedures I was using. I found the synthesiser, for example, of limited usefulness because its sound tended towards a diagrammatic rather than an organic quality. My instrumentation shifted gradually through electro-mechanical and acoustic instruments towards non-instruments like pieces of chain and sticks and stones. Coupled with this transition was an increasing interest in found sound as a completely plastic and malleable material; I never felt any sense of obligation about realism. In this category I included not only recordings of rooks, frogs and insects, but also the complete body of my own earlier work. As a result, some earlier pieces I worked on became digested by later ones, which in turn became digested again. This technique is like composting, converting what would otherwise have been waste into nourishment.
Brian Eno : 1982 : revised February 1986 “
So where does this take us? Have Tomoyoshi Date and Chihei Hatakeyama taken this idea further? Are they revisionists, updating these ideas and techniques / manifesto, or are they repeating it ( beautifully ) or what?
Admittedly, the titling suggests difference: ‘mist on the sea’ or ‘bird standing on the fall’ could be drawings in some ways, which is different from the idea of a landscape and more conceptual in some ways, more minimal, say, than ‘Lizard Point’ or ‘Dunwich Beach, Autumn 1960’. The cover artwork, a very minimal and abstract watercolour painting / drawing by Shinji Miyazawa is a bit Ralph Steadman, a bit stark in its use of line, and in a way offers a way into to the sounds via its very abstract use of form and the subtle colour gradations / balance that exist within it.
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