What Comes After is the perfect title for a collection of tracks that are, themselves, the sonic byproduct of art installations. The installation was the thing; the audio is a memory. A set of those memories is what came after. Each of the three tracks is a recording of roughly seven minutes taken from one of three different set-ups that artist Takeyuki Hakozaki had at the HAKO Gallery in Chiba, Japan, earlier this year, back in mid-February. (I’ve been to Chiba several times to attend the annual Shonen Jump festival, but I’ve never been to an art gallery in the city, which is outside Tokyo.) One of Hakozaki’s pieces involves several electric guitars resonating thanks to electric fans. Another involves audio tape rubbing against guitar strings. The third use a synthesizer to process tape loops. Each recording takes the form of a drone. Each is marked by different elements, and throughout you can hear voices here and there (if you speak Japanese, which I can’t, you might be able to make out some of what is spoken). “Air” is symphonic in scope, the overtones so rich I’d swear I can hear a choir chanting amid the resonances. Magnetic” is rough and raucous, albeit in slow motion. “Complex” is like a shoegazer track, subtler than “Air,” less frictive than “Magnetic.”
If you scroll back through the gallery’s instagram.com/hako_chiba account, you can find documentation of the first (circulator, “Air”), shown above, second (loops, “Magnetic”), and third (synthesizer, “Complex”) projects.
More on HAKO at h-a-k-o.com. More from Takeyuki Hakozaki at signflax.com and instagram.com/t.hakozaki. The audio was mastered by Taylor Deupree (of 12k Records).