(05.20.07) Kiku Hibino has been releasing albums as oto, meaning “sound”, since 2002.
He’s a Media Art and Technology graduate, so he’s no slouch at the digital
click shtick. More background colour: label name, otokikiyama, means
literally “hill from which you could listen to all of the sounds of the
whole world,” which has a nice pan-sonic symbolism to it. Like Oval’s
Markus Popp, most famously, Hibino bases his musical palette here not on
simple samples or patches or softsynths, but specifically on CD-skipping
sounds. For this, one might read what has become embraced latterly as
‘glitch’, but the skipping scam is a fairly limited device within a now
more developed choreography of post-digital sound – an amplified area Kim
Cascone has extensively mapped in The Aesthetics of Failure.
Chicago-based Hibino clearly cut his teeth on Systemisch, Ovalprocess, et
al., but he offers a more composed (in both senses) take on the
deconstructionist methodologies of Oval, and of kindred spirit,
fellow-countryman Nobukazu Takemura. Next to Takemura, for example, whose
work (e.g. Scope) seems more like a white-knuckle ride of wind-in-the-hair
aleatory brio, Hibino seems positively sedate, albeit jittery at times.
First up, “Daidai” establishes a sound which is enervatingly hyperactive
and over-Popped. The skippage seems all a bit n-n-n-n-1996 and ho-hum, and
works better when it’s made into a kinetic element, like on
“Outsideoverthere” or “Momo” wherein the skipping low-notes and recursions
of ragged-edge static set up a rhythmic element over which then cycle rapid
overpasses of other material. “Whitewall” takes a turn into more supine
ambient territory, ending in a surprisingly SotL-type drone sonata; it
could almost be digital Basinski were it not for the background
micro-clangor, wisely placed at the periphery. The title track is outside
the paradigm of the others, being more of a sound design piece with field
recordings of children at play and piano introspections – a regular
puttering metronomic sound gradually washed over by a loop sliver are all
that’s evident of the method. “Otokikiyama” also benefits from avoiding the
more disjunctive and flighty elements of error material. Focusing instead
on a more mellifluous inter-flow of fluting and fluttering, Hibino achieves
a consonance more akin to Taylor Deupree and Shuttle 358 – the softer side
of glitch, smoothing things out into streams that, with the addition of
nano-symphonic pianoid chords, gets back into that SotL float-zone once
more. The less welcome noodly wibbling collagism of the wrong end of the
early-12k template resurfaces again, before the sonorous drift style
returns to close with “Film” and a sense of sad-happy ending that leaves
the listener feeling satisfied rather than saturated.
So in sum, there are tracks where influence verges on absolute mimesis,
like the jumpy flick-book sonic cuttings that whirr through “Pappzezz” and
“Numbernine,” both doppleganger Oval specimens. But despite a certain
superficial familiarity of sound, oto’s Time Capsule Sunday remains
worthwhile and sufficiently characterful, with a discernible individual
element. oto, at best, makes of his material something approaching a sort
of post-digital poesis Oval only nodded to in passing.
Time Capsule Sunday is out now on Otokikiyama. [Purchase
