Tokyo (2014)

"Tokyo" largely utilizes heavily transfigured atmospheric location recordings made in & around the Shin-Ōkubo & Shinjuku neighborhoods, folding them into a heavily post-processed variant of an extended performance given at the "Tokyo Festival of Modular" at Super Deluxe on June 7th, 2014.

It starts out a bit lighter than "Vittorio" & peaks with a fine bit of crackling beat-less Modular drone-worship that's not far away from elements of "Disingenuousness," although the most direct predecessor would be "Dartmouth Street Underpass;" there's a very similar focus on a particular spectral element in an otherwise banal-seeming field of everyday activities - the vaguely tonal hum of a construction vehicle blocks away - that, after being subjected to analysis, noise-gating, isolation / extraction & ultimately negation & re-instation becomes a rich web of buzzing overtones & sliding pitch-scale harmonies that slowly reveal a multi-layered cloud of animated micro-events.

I was thinking of pieces such as Ferrari's "Music Promenade" when constructing this bit - and in fact many aspects to the series are indebted to this phase in Luc's work - but in application this approach has taken on a completely separate life of its own; the results couldn't be any more different.

The first "Movement" was premiered in Paris on March 6th of this year at the GRM's annual "PRÉSENCES électronique" in all of its 16-channel glory, although the stereo reduction of it here works just as beautifully on the 2-channel system of your choosing.