yui onodera / Substrate Mystery Sea (Belgium) 2007 CD-R
Recorded & composed in Tokyo, 2006-07.
All sound sources from environmental sound, electronics, voice, guitar
and piano.
■REVIEWS
Is Yui Onodera’s Substrate every bit as galvanizing as his recent And/Oar
issue? Bite your tongue. A master at extracting audio gold from lead, Onodera
can make the thinnest octave resonate brighter than a thousand supernova.
Operating at bracingly abstract levels, and using only bare essentials
(piano, voice, and processed electronics) he constructs Ikeda-like oscillations
that appear to leach out of the universe’s atomic structure. Perched up
high in the spectrum, this is the polar opposite of Phill Niblock’s cacophonia,
minimal but true, silvery threads of light irising off the hinges of pearly
gates.
SIGNAL TO NOISE #50 (USA)
Yui Onodera is a bit better known for he has releases on his own Critical
Path label, but also on Drone Records and and/OAR. Here he appears on Mystery
Sea, but his telescope is not pointed towards the sea but to the sky, to
the various stratospheres above us. In eight pieces Onodera takes us sky
high where oxygen doesn't exist, everything is pitch black and weightless.
His compositions are highly ambient in approach too and represent the 'one
stroke of paint' approach: one sound, set forward with not much change
or movement. It lasts a few minutes and then the next track appears. Quite
a minimal approach, but seeing all tracks are called 'Substrate', it's
perhaps better to think of this one track in eight parts then eight separate
tracks. It's a work that has no water references, which is kind a odd for
this label, but music wise it fits well among his fellow sailors.
Frans de Waard (VITAL WEEKLY 608)
We recently reviewed Yui Onodera’s “Suisei” (on the And/OAR label), whose
basic character derived from different treatments of recordings of water.
One supposes that there’s water in “Substrate” too, given the by now famous
aesthetic foundations of Mystery Sea. Yet that, and all the rest of the
sources that Onodera decided to exploit, are here decidedly unrecognizable
- probably for the better. What this writer didn’t know before is that
the Japanese artist is also a composer of soundtracks for experimental
films, contemporary dance and Butoh. It makes sense, as the succession
of the eight parts of this CD lets us think about the gradual development
of a choreography, one that starts with movement and nearly ends in total
standstill. At first there is a degree of slight interference amidst the
droning calmness: parallel nuances, rippled complications and deviations
attempting to barely blemish an otherwise almost too perfect beatitude.
But as the music keeps flowing, the intense beauty of these undistinguished
radiations comes in rivulets, creeks and small rivers to finally be channelled
in a static suspension of such grace that I had to associate it to Klaus
Wiese (precisely, his singing bowl trilogy “Space”, “Neptune” and “Uranus”).
Sounds that hold us to ransom until the piece - a masterful one, if you
ask me - completes its cycle, a sentiment-less microcosm traveling towards
the unknown with absolute tranquillity. Splendid release, among the Belgian
enterprise’s very best.
Massimo Ricci (TOUCHING EXTREMES)
