The whole is re-imagined into a dish fit to set before Basinski buffs and Hecker checkers. The series’ sheer sweep sees Nozaki’s sound gather in sono-dramatic force, cementing detail, texture and integration of its parts.
Tomonari Nozaki seemed to spring from nowhere fully formed with his debut, North Palace, a couple of years back. The Japanese ambient/warm noise artist’s ‘abstract sound projections and melodies using destruction techniques discovered with reel to reel tape-loop splicings and other analogue romanticisms’ (here), with their strategic saturation and designer disintegration, spoke volumes, without volume, of decay and loss. Alert igloo viewers will have registered his Histoire de Bleu for Invisible Birds, but Credence is his first for Forwind since, with Decadence and Concession close behind, making an EP trilogy, each triplet divided in two.
Credence serves as series keynote, prefiguring a wide ambit of formations–post-classical expressionism, neo-romanticist excesses, all tempered with lo-fi minimalism, smeared and bespeckled with ambient noise. “Pt. 1” presents a slow mutating sound field with dense morphing layers of electro-acoustics and post-industrial thrum against a saturated sonic sky fluctuating in intensity until oceanic closure. “Pt. 2” deviates slightly from style template, with gauzy slivers running through ambient grain, as if rain below leaking into underground machinery. Decadence picks up the thematic trajectory with “Pt. 1” setting out from sacral foothills in a wide-sky ascent through a grained mezzanine of distortion; solemn drone cedes to a disintegrative wind; it tells of serenity and decay. “Pt. 2” ups the ante, unravelling concrète into a kinetic tract reconciling hushed ambient noise, rhythmic detritus and ecstatic drone; angelic vocalizations looped and treated, strange devices whirling somewhere. In the end all is swept away, fragile and mechanical alike–a desolate rumble. Concession signs off the series with further aperture of sonic spectrum, “Pt. 1” programmes in piano; hints at haunted micro-sonata, maximum sum from parts, binaries stylistic (expressionist<->minimalist) and affective (delighted<->doleful) dissolved. “Pt. 2” is a fitting closure–folding layers of ethereal sound waves, caustic timbres and off-grid rhythms into a steepling climax. In the end, the vortex sucks in all that is–cathedral tones and chorales buried beneath chthonic drones. Leaving just vestiges… echoes of what once was.
The whole is re-imagined into a dish fit to set before Basinski buffs and Hecker checkers. The series’ sheer sweep sees Nozaki’s sound gather in sono-dramatic force, cementing detail, texture and integration of its parts.
Credence, Decadence and Concession are available on forwind [FWD12|FWD13|FWD14]
