Over nine, numbered tracks, Nobuto Suda musters a slew of acoustic, electronic and digital music-making devices and redacts the world like a palimpsest, written on and erased over and over again.
It is the nature of things to change. You’ll never step into the same river twice, Heraclitus pointed out. The world is clear but ambiguous. It is an evolving sculpture, reusing the same material, matter occupying space to create a variety of intensities. Though it may be painful, human relationships thrive on change and ambiguity, as does the art we make of it and lesson we take from it.
Over nine, numbered tracks, Nobuto Suda musters a slew of acoustic, electronic and digital music-making devices and redacts the world like a palimpsest, written on and erased over and over again. Transitoriness floats in like a calliope being played by a soft westerly breeze over the shallowest of streams. ”Two” is change so literal it is erosion itself, one element eating up another. Straddling this littoral zone, Suda assumes an amphibian stance. “Three” is guitar, piano and synthesizer as falling leaves. “Four” is even more transportively weightless.
“Six” could be fire, could be rain—or the crackling of thin tin sheeting, or raindrops on a robust tin roof, but regardless, it is very close by. Conversely, the circular, repetitive theme has a great distance to travel on “Eight,” reaching us through parched air. And yet after the drought comes the deluge, as the album closes with a fresh, new flow and new growth begins to inscribe its story.
Always discretely, Suda revels in this liminal world, rubbing the hard against the soft, organic against digital, juxtaposing the confident and the tentative.
Transitoriness is available on Organic Industries.
