>”I love the soundscape here. First of all, the fact that it’s changing all the time,” Stone says of his desire to remain in Tokyo. “There’s an ecology of sound here. A sound that exists now might be gone in five, 10 years. Just as the sounds I recorded when I was here in the beginning of the Heisei Era (1989-2019) don’t exist anymore. For example, there was a time when there weren’t automatic ticket gates. There was a line of men punching your little ticket. A big station had 20 people lined up in a row. It was a great sound.”
That’s from a great profile of the composer-performer Carl Stone in today’s Japan Times. Titled [
“Carl Stone: Plugging into the sounds of the changing city”](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2019/09/25/music/carl-stone-plugging-sounds-changing-city/?fbclid=IwAR3C7yekvRRFJeBnojpWRUasibODvHShp1MnljndepzJKJl-UVOzfaAbbO8#.XYt9ki2B2Rs) and conducted by Katherine Whatley, it provides a thorough overview of his life and work, written with a local audience in mind, “local” meaning Japanese, because the Los Angeles native has lived in the country for roughly two decades.
I’ve admired his work at least since I first saw him perform in New Orleans many years ago, likely earlier, and I wrote liner notes for a 2016 album of his archival works (*Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties* on the Unseen Worlds label). I’ve shared meals with him (a meaningful statement where he’s concerned, since he often titles his compositions after restaurants he favors; the late, legendary food critic Jonathan Gold, an old friend of Stone’s, wrote liner notes for the same album I did), and I have a review coming out in *The Wire* of the recent San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, which Stone headlined.
And yet still, I found his comments about the sound of place to provide a new fresh vantage on a composer whose work is so multifaceted. Here’s another tasty snippet, one with which the Whatley article closes:
>”People talk about Tokyo or Ueno Station in the Meiji Era (1868-1912) with everyone wearing geta or zori (traditional Japanese sandals). Think of the reverberations. I kind of regret that I never got a chance to hear that.”
Read the full piece at [japantimes.co.jp](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2019/09/25/music/carl-stone-plugging-sounds-changing-city/?fbclid=IwAR3C7yekvRRFJeBnojpWRUasibODvHShp1MnljndepzJKJl-UVOzfaAbbO8#.XYt9ki2B2Rs).