The “sound report” composed in tandem by Marihiko Hara and Hideki Umezawa, multimedia artists from Kyoto and Tokyo, respectively, is quiet and scraggly, just as promised, and distant enough to hold the listener just as bemused as Akutagawa holds his readers. It sounds as if it is being played back on a water-damaged tape recorder.
[Release page] Combining music and literature, reappropriation of art for the public domain and a disregard for capitalism’s opinions on intellectual property rights, English independent Wist Rec “frames new ways of listening” with a bold idea. Aside from releasing regular compact discs devoted to “quiet, scraggly, distant sounds,” it has retrofitted a series of Penguin Mini Modern Classic paperbacks with new, opaque dust covers and a three-inch disc hung inside as “The Book Report Series.” Contributors have included Clem Leek, OfftheSky, Danny Norbury and Gareth Davis and authors H.P. Lovecraft, Stefan Zweig, Angela Carter and Malcolm Lowry.
In this instance, the book contains two short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, the troubled author of Rashomon who took his own life at the age of thirty-five. “Hell Screen” (Jigokuhen in the original Japanese) was published in 1918 but set in the eleventh century, a macabre tale of a great painter commissioned to create a screen depicting Buddhist hell. Incapable of painting what he has not seen with his own eyes, he tortures his apprentices in order to harvest subject matter. A second novella, The Spider’s Thread is a morality tale about the Buddha’s treatment of a selfish sinner who actually finds himself there.
The “sound report” composed in tandem by Marihiko Hara and Hideki Umezawa, multimedia artists from Kyoto and Tokyo, respectively, is quiet and scraggly, just as promised, and distant enough to hold the listener just as bemused as Akutagawa holds his readers. It sounds as if it is being played back on a water-damaged tape recorder. It is a sad bronze gong in a forgotten rural temple, wood rotting and curling, a busted piano and busting guitar strings, leaky steam pipes, a maelstrom of rusting machinery, sudden, unsettling silences and a runny nose in rotten weather.
Jigokuhen is available on Wist Rec. [Release page]
