Tokyo-based musician Yasuo Akai lists his piece of music “Be It So” as “w. Chris Lynn,” the latter phrase appearing in a parenthetical after the track’s title. The combination of the letter w and a single period is shorthand for “with” and generally is intended to suggest a collaboration that comes up short of a duet, a piece of music in which one of the two participants is clearly the lead, and the other plays a supporting role. In the case of “Be It So,” the roles are just so. Lynn’s part in it was to provide source material, the “impros/field recordings” from which Akai than constructed his piece. Akai’s work makes the original sounds largely unrecognizable as field recordings, not that we know, for sure, what they sounded like originally. He also moves quickly from a form that suggests a song-like approach to one that embraces a more gestural mode. The song-like sensibility arrives early on, when, 10 seconds in, the initial tones are heard to repeat, suggesting a theme, and while those sounds are heard a subsequent time, it is not in a manner that could be considered a chorus or a verse. Instead there is a sequence of gentle phrases that are at times shot through by a building noise, a welt that sounds like a speaker cone has gone moldy with neglect. Rather than disrupt the softer tones, the rougher passages makes them appear all the more soft by setting them in clear contrast.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/yasuoakai. More on Yasuo Akai at thefirstpersonpronountowear.blogspot.com. More on Chris Lynn at framingsounds.wordpress.com. For lack of a visual, the above image is a still from a forthcoming Super 8 film by Lynn.
You can, indeed, have your UI cake, or at least your UI eye candy, and eat it, too. And sometimes the easiest way to accomplish this goal is to relegate the two different tasks to two different online locales. The netlabel Pocket Fields, for example, is lovely, as is often the music that it releases. Each page on its Tumblr-powered site (
In a clear case of more allowing for less to occur, the team-up of powerhouses Karlheinz Essl and Hans Tammen is a rich improvisation between the former’s laptop and the latter’s computer-processed guitar. To listen is often to hear neither, and to forget frequently that anyone, let alone two people, is playing. The opening track, “Brutz,” is often little more than flittering nuances. The guitar evaporates in the laptop’s processing, and the dual computers yield slivers of sound, drones that might just be the result of an ungrounded line, effects that could be artifacts in the sound recording. There’s a moment, for example, in a track titled “Prelock” when it sounds as if we’ve left the concert hall (the work was recorded live at Harvestworks in New York City back in May 2010) and wandered down to the subway. Elsewhere, there’s a point in “Nomisola” when piano chords are heard, but they drift away, subsumed in the nether-absence of obfuscating noises and general compositional entropy. Later, in the same track, what might be a guitar chord but resembles an archival orchestral recording gets tossed here and there like seaweed as it nears a shore, where it will soon dry and, soon enough, flutter away.
