There’s a lot to recommend the new split release by Yumi Iwaki and Ryan J Raffa, Living Distances (on the Muzan Editions label, out of Nara, Japan). Start with Iwaki’s “April,” a thick bed of throbbing, pulsing tones plus Cheshire Cat choral vocal effects appearing here and there in the mix. Then go for “Correlation,” Raffa’s combination of rattling metallic effects and fragmented field recordings. There’s much much more to the album’s 10 tracks, some more challenging (Iwaki has a thing for fractured dream-state sound design, notably on “Spiral Flow”), others welcomingly lulling (Raffa closes things out with an artificial landscape the listener will be hard put to exit; fortunately it’s the longest track on Living Distances).
Album originally posted at muzaneditions.bandcamp.com. More from Iwaki at soundcloud.com/iwakiyumi and from Raffa at rjraffa.net. Both are based in Tokyo, Japan.
Sounding great. Particularly taken by ‘Esora’ on first listen.