Koji Asano: Flow-Augment
(Solstice: 12)
Koji Asano: Preparing for April
(Solstice: 13)
Koji Asano: Momentum
(Solstice: 14)
Koji Asano (compositions)
In a sense, reviewing these three releases together makes very little sense. One is a set of performances for classical chamber group, one a set of deliberately deteriorated recordings of piano music and the other a highly minimal electroacoustic exploration. Yet reviewing them together is crucial, because they all come from the "pen" of the same composer, Barcelona-based Koji Asano.
Asano appears to come from a "straight" classical background, and to have a deep interest in the classical tradition, including its avant garde, as something to work within and against rather than to simply disregard as irrelevant. Hence, subverting the traditional hi-fi snobbery of that genre, "Preparing for April" takes some monolithic, churning compositions from Terry Riley or Charlenagne Palestine's limb of the American avant garde and records them on something like a dictaphone, creating grainy, muffled and disorientating soundscapes with no bass and much distortion.
What sounds like a recipe for unlistenable nonsense turns out to be an intriging listen as the music transforms itself into an abstract wall of noise, ever-fluctuating but never really resolving itself into the sound of a piano. The fact that the music is, in itself, not terribly "difficult" -- it's quasi-tonal and highly rhythmic -- only makes this more affecting, as something which sounds as if it ought to be very tame and accessible continually refuses to be anything but weird and surprising. An extremely effective contribution to conceptual music, which can be so tiresomely self-satisfied and shallow.
"Flow-Augment" sounds far more conventional, and maybe it's just that: two pianos, violin, viola, cello and bass tackle three fifteen-to-twenty minute pieces in a politely classical-sounding acoustic. These pieces are very enjoyable works with much in common with Berio and some of the Scandinavian school (Magnus Lindberg springs to mind), but the concept-heavy Asano of "Preparing..." seems entirely absent.
These two CDs, then, make a very peculiar juxtaposition, but there's no reason why any composer should be forced to work with big ideas all the time. Although not startlingly original, this music does have plenty of character and it certainly isn't bland. Asano structures each piece in segments, making them move from scene to scene like a film, carrying certain motifs or ideas across the boundaries. Those who enjoy this branch of "new music" are urged to check it out.
After these two discs, it's hard to know what to expect from "Momentum", the composer's latest. In fact, it's in a whole different field, that of, well, what one might call "electrical music". A couple of bass speakers are fitted with contact mikes on their cones and manipulated to produce surprisingly varied sounds from such a limited source.
"Momentum" is a triumph. The fast pulsations of the woofers as they play what must be inaudibly low notes becomes, in Asano's hands, a material for extremely subtle explorations of very fast rhythms, rhythms which mutate, change speed, develop weird timbres or lie on top of one another. The effect is captivating; all the clocks in the house stop. Weaving between this quiet thunder are whistles of feedback, gracefully controlled to create singing, sweeping lines which come and go as the music rolls relentlessly onward. Highly recommended.