Nobuto Suda is a Kyoto, Japan”“based musician. Stijn Hüwels, who goes by Steiner, is a musician based in Leuven, Belgium. Together they made the plainly titled “A Piece in Collaboration with Stijn Hüwels,” which Suda posted this week to his SoundCloud account. The piece is described as a tribute to the Mirei Shigemori Garden Museum in Kyoto. The garden dates from the late 1700s. The track is, like the garden, an exercise is architectural elegance that either is intruded upon or frames birdsong, depending on your perspective. (I vote for the latter.) In the track there is a simple acoustic guitar line that echoes into the distance. Sometimes that echoing matches the metrics of the original guitar, and sometimes the echo plays slightly against the source audio, testing the placidity of the overall track. Throughout, birdsong, perhaps recorded by Suda at the Shigemori, fills the space between the notes, much as a glass house reflects back the nature by which it is surrounded.
Track originally posted to soundcloud.com/nobutosuda1101. More from Hüwels at soundcloud.com/steiner. More on the Shigemori at japanesegardens.jp.