| 2016-07-22 |
31 |
Aube |
"Spectrum" |
Magnetostriction |
The single artist who most changed my understanding of the power of minimalism in compositional method and maximalism in sonic depth was Akifumi Nakajima, the Japanese noise-artist who recorded as Aube. He died in 2013. It seems profoundly tragic to me that he thus basically missed the streaming age, which I think could have been uniquely suited for him. But pieces of his vast and vastly obscure catalog are gradually making their way onto Spotify. The Aube thing was usually to take some singular source of sound, and then fold, spindle, mutilate and process it into a distended storm of cosmic-gestational scope. The 1995 album Magnetostriction, which was one of the first few Aube records I ever heard, begins with a magnetic resonance spectroscope, somehow, and turns it into about an hour of ambient exegesis. Listening to this is a form of anti-meditative meditation. |
