Five möbius strips curving into ambient eternity.
Prefacing the four, quarter-hour “chapters” of Tomonari Nozaki’s Une histoire de bleu are one hundred and sixty four seconds of ocean waves lapping at an empty beach. Or it could be the never-ending storm on top of Saturn. And it could be made out of surging static electricity. Either way, it is an irenic head-clearer with which to allow his story of blue to unfold. Its description as “abstract sound projections and melodies using destruction techniques discovered with reel to reel tape-loop splicings and other analogue Romanticisms” immediately calls (or shouts) to mind the work of William Basinski and his disintegration loops, and there certainly is shared ground in reaching for the sublime through retrogression.
Like Basinski, Nozaki succeeds magnificently, though without having his tapes dandruff into obscurity in the making, even though they do occasionally and artfully fail. The first chapter of Une histoire de bleu has that classic, far-away Brian Eno sway, while the second is ghostly and desolate as Rapoon. The third chapter has an orchestra sweep, a deep pathos, a cozy autumnal sadness. It is reminiscent of one of the rolling, pastoral landscapes of Andrew Deutsch’s Loops Over Land, just as it leans toward Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” “Chapter Four” recalls Basinski with the greatest clarity, graceful and ever falling, ever falling.
Five möbius strips curving into ambient eternity.
Une histoire de bleu is available on Invisible Birds.
