Info

Generic City w/Yui Onodera

Generic City w/Yui Onodera

Format: CD
Label: Two Acorns
Catalog: 2A01
Release date: 11/1/10

Out of print

Track list:
1 An Imaginary Tale Of Lost Vernacular
2 Waiting Until Something Else Happens
3 The Street Of A Rainy, Gray Day
4 A Renewed Awareness Of Home

Release description:
For this collaboration work, I made a lot of field recordings. Songs of migratory birds that come to a big lake only in winter, the sound of breaking ice, frozen on a lake, the peal of huge bells in a temple, voices in prayer to the Buddha, footsteps in the subway, on the ground, made by coming and going people, machine sounds at a construction site, rain flowing into a steel pipe with a hard sound, the oscillation sound of rubbing iron which was recorded through a contact mic set on steel, the conversation of people walking in the city, noise of vehicles and trucks, kids voices from an elementary school, and so on. Like a time trip to transcend places, these sound-scapes are presented as a imaginary tale. To collaborate with foreign artists became a chance for facing Japan again for me. Reflecting on each of our localities to compose let us be aware anew of the vernacular which has been lost in the global world. Artists can’t be unrelated to the characteristics (culture) of places (surroundings) where they live, and they are influenced obliviously in some way. By watching our everyday surroundings closely, we can engender a most realistic language of where we live, and how we think. I sense that peculiar, unfamiliar cultures and customs are invaluable wealth in human history. – Yui Onodera

In this collaboration work with Yui Onodera, we contributed many instrument sounds, and field recordings such as the streets of Los Angeles, rain on our doorstep, water draining into the gutter, cars passing on wet and slippery streets, people walking on their way home from work, talking in an airport baggage claim, crosswalks, airliners flying over, taxi rides, riding bikes through traffic, conversations in restaurants, the Metro Link train in Los Angeles, and walking on quiet streets. In our part of mixing, since we were working with someone’s instrument sounds and field recordings from a city that we haven’t visited, much was left to our imagination to re-create an environment and city setting for the piece. Trying to keep a balance between the heavily processed material and the entirely unprocessed material, created a natural bridge of movement inside the city. Processed elements became backdrops and scores to real activity, sometimes simply drifting away from the daily life, or the finding the soul of the pieces. When these two entirely different cities came together, it created an all new way of looking at, and hearing the city’s movements around us. Cultures parallel one another, with the views of the skylines and empty streets left the only visible evidence of similarity. – Danielle Baquet-Long, Will Long

Press reviews:

Boomkat
Celer’s archival output over recent times has been prolific to say the least, and now Will Long (one-half of the duo) sets up his own label, Two Acorns. For this new imprint’s inaugural release Celer collaborated with Japanese artist Yui Onodera, with mastering duties performed by 12k boss Taylor Deupree. While much of the established Celer sound centres upon thoughtful, droning austerity this album is given a very different shape by extensive field recording work from both Los Angeles and Japaninvolved. Woven into this tapestry of environmental sounds and floating tonality you’ll hear migratory birds, ice breaking on a frozen lake, temple bells and sounds made by people in restaurants or on public transport systems. It’s becoming difficult to keep up with Celer’s release schedule, but it’s still well worth trying to maintain pace – Generic City benefits from Onodera’s additional pair of ears, and the final mix strikes up a deftly poised balance between beautiful ambience and more revelatory acousmatic material; in its finest moments Generic City offers an absorbing, occasionally hallucinatory portal into the audio topography of urban spaces. Gorgeous.

Tokafi
The oeuvres of Yui Onodera and Celer have served as powerful reminders that music is, at heart, a wordless communication tool. While Onodera set architectural patterns and sociological ponderings to sound in a string of minutely planned works, the former’s discography typically dealt with themes manifesting themselves outside the grasp of rational analysis: Resembling haikus in their pointed precision and brevity, Baquet-Long’s associative lyrical introductions acted as portals into epic worlds where sound, space, time and resonance penetrated the true nature of emotion more accurately than any four-minute pop-song ever could. Of course, on both accounts, these statements were ultimately of a personal nature, a sonic transcription of inner perspectives. And yet, as their first collaboration, initiated as early as 2007, took shape, it quickly became apparent that its implications were far more universal and incisive than any of their solo records. Quite clearly, there was a place where the poetic and the political met – and Generic City made it its point of departure.

The openly conceptual aspects of their interaction only became apparent at a later stage, however – unsurprisingly for artists so deeply engaged with the pure, unmediated beauty of sound, questions of philosophy were relegated to second tier. On the face of it, therefore, there is no need whatsoever to treat Generic City as anything other than a languid and deep trip of sweetly scented atmospherics: Bracketed by an episode of nerve-wrecking bird song (cranes? wild geese?) and a tender music box finale, opener „An imaginary tale of lost vernacular“ is essentially a single, drawn-out drone all but imperceptibly changing in frequential richness and pulsation over the course of its sixteen-minute duration, with a delicate film of metallic chiming adding an ethereal halo. The way that some of the pieces are composed of various shorter episodes – especially so in the two somewhat more brief cuts „Waiting until something else happens“ and „The street of a rainy, gray day“, which, despite their more fragmented character, form a cohesive interrelated middle section – is also decidedly reminiscent of previous Celer-albums like „Engaged Touches“, which combined an epic outlook with an intuitive and scenic approach.

To the artists, meanwhile, the real importance of their collaboration lay precisely in its extra-musical dimensions. For Onodera, on the one hand, working with Celer allowed him a long-sought-for unpremeditated perspective on his Japanese identity. Already his 2007-release „Suisei“, which prominently featured on-site recordings of his hometown Tokyo, was an effort of sculpting a metaphorical landscape intricately intertwined with physical reality. And yet, even though its immersive introspection awarded it a hands-on quality, it was bound to remain an acoustic mirror of mainly emotional factors, a subjective analysis. On Generic City, this perceptional imbalance is offset by the process of sharing source materials in a bid of expressing global aspects of society through sound. For Long and Baquet-Long, vice versa, Onodera’s concretisation of their self-admittedly rather „vague“ notions at the outset awarded the final result a new kind of striking urgency and deliberation. Two, partially paradoxical, themes are serving as Leitmotifs in this respect: On the one hand, the levelling-out of local identities in favour of a water-downed cultural consensus. And, on the other, the idea of cities representing chaotic cosmoses, in which, underneath a blanket of supposed order, a plethora of individual events suggest the existence of a still free and liberated micro-cosmos. The latter is apparent through the multitude of different episodes the album is moving through: There are sounds from Winter and sounds of Summer, loud and aggressive episodes and almost inaudible sequences, noises of nature and of man as well as the delicate textures of breaking ice. None of the artists involved is afraid of cutting off some of the most placid and contemplative inventions right at the moment of their most heartfelt intensity: In one particularly striking passage, an at first fragile oscillation of the same chord alternately played in a minor and major key turns into what could well be a frenzied outburst of ragged guitar riffing.

As Onodera has pointed out, the way these seemingly diametrically opposed elements were made to correspond with each other was in fact inspired by the very ability of cities to merge and reconcile the most blatant contradictions. Despite its critical stance towards urban trends, Generic City is, after all, very much the product of three city dwellers putting their ultimate fantasy into practise: Creating a metropolis of pure sound. You can literally spend hours inside its thoroughfares and side-alleys, on its avenues and squares, in its parks and buildings. The utopia lies in the idea that, in such an imaginary space, sonic events will eventually detach themselves from their worldy limitations and start interacting according to the inner logic of their timbres alone. And so it seems perfectly natural that, on brooding and mysterious closer „A renewed awareness of home“, the massive reverberations of a huge gong are merging seamlessly into a Buddhist prayer chant filled with natural harmonics, which, in the end, gloriously coalesce into a glowing sheet of texture. „The street of a rainy, gray day“, meanwhile, includes a three-minute-sequence composed exclusively of field recordings, gradually segueing from a bustling city scene to the artificial calm of an airport and planes thunderously panning from left to right.

Nothing here is left to chance, even the most seemingly random snippet of sound having been selected with a very particular reason and compositional function in mind. Accordingly, the album is never just a trivial tirade against the side-effects of globalisation, but always a stab at an alternative as well. If Onodera is right, it is through listening closely to our immediate surroundings that we are still able to glean the traces of a unique local vocabulary. It is never fully spelled out on Generic City, but one can’t hold that against it: What really defines our sense of home and belonging can simply not be put into words.

Foxy Digitalis
Wake Up. What we have here is an experiment by odds. What should we call this? What should we call what’s come together with one mind?

Out of one came many. Generic man wandering through Generic City. Yui Onodera and Celer are creating a dreamlike state of mind, where when we fall asleep, drones handcuff us in our dream. It’s impossible to wake up now. We’re too young for our hearts to stop. Traveling in different areas of the city, we’re following the maze leading us to the grave, trying to make sense of the confusion and loss. We need to continue the work that the footsteps started. Those who disobeyed now obey.

Only the Old-Timers know what kind of time is passing through us. When we close our eyes, millions of civilians arrive by car loads. You can hear their voices in a distance, but when you actually hear what they speak, they confuse you with wordplay. Reciting mantras, as if they were to build a new family tree upon the smoking ruins of their own cities. Our children looking out of the windows, the sky filled with total darkness, the world in total stillness. Until a plane passes by, ripping the seams of the sky in a blur. Electric light, light up the neon skies, electric soul, generic soul…

Touching Extremes
The first release on the label recently launched by Celer’s Will Long couldn’t have been better, including the wonderful cover photos by his late wife Dani, who participated in the recordings and to whom the record is dedicated, just like everything else Will does. I won’t be tedious in listing the sources utilized in this magnificent piece of music, although they’re almost entirely indicated in the press blurb. Some are immediately comprehensible, others are revealed with the passage of time and come out little by little, either as mild surprises or more shocking appearances – but never, ever in less than touching fashion. The remaining colours mesh in heartrending blurs of drones and aural rainbows. I’ll say this: Generic City – rarely a title thus distant from truth is found – is a work from which the masses of imitators should learn; not by taking its ideas and concepts and reproducing them as third-hand copies, but deciding once and for all to give up presumptuous dilettantism, retreat in silence and let the masters of the game perform their job.

Stillness is where this luminescent album is coming from, in spite of the fact that not a single second of emptiness appears throughout. The motionlessness we’re referring to is related to the total awareness of something that can’t possibly put into writing, perhaps experienced while looking at a valley at sunset, or walking on a shore by yourself or with a loved one, surrounded only by the wind and the sea wash. Or maybe to the realization that a man is alone, but is not alone. You can pretend enlightenment and declare of being someone who’s following “paths”, to the point of choosing a person as a spiritual guide and believe you’re doing the right thing. However, a beautiful, indescribable sound appearing from nowhere is the lone moment in which that connection with the unknown really happens, and there’s no way to fake this sensation by masking it through futile words or dramatic acting: legitimately vibrating beings are going to expose your lie. If the instruments to decode that manifestation are not present from the beginning, then it’s a flat kind of existence that those individuals are facing.

These four tracks are intense, delicate and useful for self-collection, becoming a necessary company after mere moments. Onodera and Celer managed to engender a true masterpiece which needs no stupid classification. To quote Long, “there is no replacement for the smell of a book, the spin of a CD player starting, or the consistently changing nature of our memories”.

Mapsadaisical
Despite a lack of rain, the river still flows. Fairly recently, I remarked on the surprisingly steady stream of Celer-related material which was still emerging. It has now become a cascade, tumbling down with such speed and volume that a new vessel has been created to hold some of the overflow: Two Acorns. Two Acorns is a new imprint curated by Celer’s Will Long and dedicated to Danielle Baquet-Long, which will focus (understandably) on “sentimentality, in all its forms”, which will include not just recordings, but also books. The first bottling from this freshly-assembled vat is a fine blend of Celer and sound artist Yui Onodera, labelled Generic City.

The two (or indeed three) never actually met during the recording process. This was a purely long distance relationship, with Onodera remaining in his native Tokyo, and Celer in Los Angeles. Given that both use the same modus operandi, namely combining field recordings from the city with electronics and acoustic instruments, the result smears one city into the other, emphasising their similarity as much as their differences. As much as the album is about Tokyo or Los Angeles, it is about the things that they, and indeed other cities share (hence the “Generic City” of the album’s title), and the links which bind them. The mall chatter and traffic hum could originate from either, as could much of the instrumentation: guitar, violin, cello and piano spill out softly from the speakers, lingering in the sustained spaces derived in some way from Japanese gagaku and minimalist western classical music, without explicitly referencing either. Only rarely in fact do the sounds obviously relate to one city or the other: the sound of prayer or schoolchildren singing can be fixed with some certainty, and the drones at times take on the feel of a giant Buddhist singing bowl. I’m on shakier ground when it comes to the flock of birds which opens the album: a number of species of birds migrate from the US to Japan, tracing a natural arc between the respective lands.

And of course it isn’t only the birds which would travel between the two: a large chunk of the recording emanates from the environs of an airport, with its final calls and runway roar, the sound of bridges being built between cities in the sky. Despite what the map may suggest, the album quietly makes the point that Tokyo and Los Angeles aren’t as far apart as they once were. As a music box twinkles softly in the background, this Generic City feels like home.

Scrapyard Forecast
This is the first release on Will Long’s (aka Celer) recently born label Two Acorns. Founded this year, Will plans to release material through a variety of mediums, not just formats, including books and film. I’m interested in seeing how this versatile label pans out.

Admittedly, I’ve never been a big Celer fan, partially because I’m always weary at any artist/band that spits out more than a release per month. I guess you could say that I’ve never under appreciated the value of quality control. The other reason is that of the handful of Celer albums I’ve acquired, it’s become a daunting task in its own right to tell any of them apart. So I ask, does a band need to make the same album over and over again to get recognition? I like to imagine that if the music can speak for itself, then less is certainly more. But this is a collab, so anything could happen. When this release was passed on to me (thanks again, Mathieu) I was, needless to say, skeptical. Upon tuning into the shaky opening sequence–an awfully rendered cacophony of bird calls, with no low-end to speak of–my skepticism was nearly solidified. Luckily, that opening sequence is quickly fizzled away by a more than sublime drone. Ever ponder at how amazing it is that an elegant flower can spawn from everyday dirt? Well then, welcome to Generic City. I’d say it’s almost an underlying theme here: beauty created from dirt. And the album does have many exquisite parts, all of them in some form or another taking shape as stretched movements of blurred texture, often revealing multiple tiers of sound and hinting at what’s to come. Field recordings are cited as having a big role on the album, and it’s easy enough to pick them out: birds, the crunch of ground beneath footsteps, rain, airports, cars, voices, chants and much more. Although there seems to be varying levels of obfuscation in the recordings, sometimes they are left completely unprocessed, while other times manipulated into unrecognizable sources. When an equilibrium is maintained between these two levels, like when a raw field recording is layered beneath a waxing drone, Will and Yui are at their strongest. The extremely wide scope of sounds captured in the field makes for a bit of a lackluster focus. Although, when imagining all the sounds that a city has to offer in a single day’s commute, it becomes apparent that our lives, too, are bombarded by the billowing of concrete environments. I like to imagine the quieter moments as an escape from all that, a sudden turn down an alley where the street traffic becomes muffled, a detour through an urban park, or a stumbled entry into a church or monastery, where time and sound lay still for just a moment before you have to face the noise once again. I can see this album squeezing its way into some year end lists. Good stuff, recommended.

Cyclic Defrost
Will Long’s Two Acorns label proffers it’s debut release, an album predominately of a seamless interweaving of field recordings and drones. It examines, takes note, documents and appreciates two cities, specifically Celer’s (Danielle Baquet-Long, Will Long) Los Angeles and Yui Onodera’s Tokyo, of which the melded Generic City is formed. The gulls cry wakes the album as closer recording zooms to the cry as cacophony and the discrete background movement of the city occurs while drone sound is introduced as a low solemn presence. Cut to the crunch of footsteps along a linear tone. Such description could be maintained for the whole album, it would end up being a scenic narrative not unlike the script to a nature and urban environment documentary without a narration.The shear amount of field recordings is impressive, and the quality of the recording techniques gives a distinct sharpness and honed in attention to the sounds with incidental sound at a minimum. To imagine the ratio of included material to discarded would be radically lopsided, then the speculated time to prepare the base material for the concept is a remarkable feat only made reasonable by digital recording. To merely quote Onodera’s sample list: Songs of migratory birds that come to a big lake only in winter, the sound of breaking ice, frozen on a lake, the peal of huge bells in a temple, voices in prayer to the Buddha, footsteps in the subway, on the ground, made by coming and going people, machine sounds at a construction site, rain flowing into a steel pipe with a hard sound, the oscillation sound of rubbing iron which was recorded through a contact mic set on steel, the conversation of people walking in the city, noise of vehicles and trucks, kids voices from an elementary school, and so on.. Or Celer’s samples: rain on our doorstep, water draining into the gutter, cars passing on wet and slippery streets, people walking on their way home from work, talking in an airport baggage claim, crosswalks, airliners flying over, taxi rides, riding bikes through traffic, conversations in restaurants, the Metro Link train in Los Angeles, and walking on quiet streets.

All held together by wavering tones and drones which sing at times, as if all the samples had been dropped into a Tibetan singing bowl, which infused all things its resonant tendency. In doing so it links together a causal chain that joins the cities together and weaves the incidentals into a coherent story. Or rather four tracks of discrete snapshots of this imagined home remotely gathered and fused with Onodera’s electronics, guitar, violin, piano and musical box along with Celer’s mixing board, cello, violin, piano, theremin, electronics and ocarina. The instruments often so removed from their normative practice as to become indistinguishable from the bustle of the imaginary city. They are fused together by a strange alchemy that throws them into the unknown everyday beauty as this collaboration gently rescues the everyday from its seemly monotony and creates a meditative tableau of radiance. The mastering of Taylor Deupree is a distinct part of the beauty, it heightens the sublime attaching an immediacy and weight to strong impulses that challenge the psyche and holds back to let the weave of sounds be the focal point at other times. It is a very impressive debut to a label, an arresting ambient album of crisp field recordings and immaculate drones, it weaves the thread of beauty through the everyday and widens our sense of the real. The title of the last track sums up the inclination and achievement of the album, A Renewed Sense of Home.

Olive Music
Generic City is an almost perfect execution of collaborating. Performing together are two reputable acts in ambient and experimental music, consisting of Japanese composer and multi-instrumentalist Yui Onodera as well as the prolific Californian duo of Celer. With both collaborators being immensely talented in their own rights, the pooling of their separate ideas has equated to four movements of boundlessly stellar exploration.

These 47 minutes represent a combination of two cultures and lifestyles from each of their perspectives. Yui Onodera incorporates recordings of Japans variety of customs: children playing, temple bells, voices in prayer to Buddha, among many others. Celer present sounds from the metropolitan lifestyle of Los Angeles: cars passing, conversations between people in restaurants, pedestrians within a plethora of other sounds. All of this incorporated found sound from their locations is intertwined with the use of musical instruments as well; guitar, electronics, violin, cello, and even more unconventional instrumentation like theremin and ocarina.

Rather than accenting the music itself, the field recordings are the main attraction on Generic City. Surely, the instrumentation and the ecoacoustics are in constant rotation– however the music is exceptionally minimal, with resonating hums that manifest within an attentive listen. This leaves all heads turned toward the atmospheres of each location, which bleed into one another seamlessly and allow the urban theme of these four pieces to come full circle.

Onodera and Celer acknowledge that both settings aren’t meant to be seen as two unrelated parts of the world, or a side-by-side comparison of the two cultures– but make note that though geographically distanced, these concepts are connected by nature. Generic City alludes to the idea that musicians are subconsciously influenced by their environment, and the way that the artists’ music blends with nature strongly represents this idea.

5:4
Generic City is an almost perfect execution of collaborating. Performing together are two reputable acts in ambient and experimental music, consisting of Japanese composer and multi-instrumentalist Yui Onodera as well as the prolific Californian duo of Celer. With both collaborators being immensely talented in their own rights, the pooling of their separate ideas has equated to four movements of boundlessly stellar exploration.

These 47 minutes represent a combination of two cultures and lifestyles from each of their perspectives. Yui Onodera incorporates recordings of Japans variety of customs: children playing, temple bells, voices in prayer to Buddha, among many others. Celer present sounds from the metropolitan lifestyle of Los Angeles: cars passing, conversations between people in restaurants, pedestrians within a plethora of other sounds. All of this incorporated found sound from their locations is intertwined with the use of musical instruments as well; guitar, electronics, violin, cello, and even more unconventional instrumentation like theremin and ocarina.

Rather than accenting the music itself, the field recordings are the main attraction on Generic City. Surely, the instrumentation and the ecoacoustics are in constant rotation– however the music is exceptionally minimal, with resonating hums that manifest within an attentive listen. This leaves all heads turned toward the atmospheres of each location, which bleed into one another seamlessly and allow the urban theme of these four pieces to come full circle.

Onodera and Celer acknowledge that both settings aren’t meant to be seen as two unrelated parts of the world, or a side-by-side comparison of the two cultures– but make note that though geographically distanced, these concepts are connected by nature. Generic City alludes to the idea that musicians are subconsciously influenced by their environment, and the way that the artists’ music blends with nature strongly represents this idea.

It’s particularly striking, then, that the opening track of Generic City, a collaboration by Celer & sound artist Yui Onodera, begins amidst an obvious field recording of the calls & honks of a large flock of what sound like swans. Titled “An Imaginary Tale of Lost Vernacular”, one detects, early on, that ambient textures are present, but they are kept at bay for some minutes before moving into the foreground. This sets the tone for the rest of the album, one in which overtly anecdotal sounds happily coexist with abstract textures; no hints of unease here. Having said that, a lack of unease can’t of itself make the abstract & anecdotal gel—nothing could—yet what Onodera & Celer establish in this track is a continuum of sorts, the music moving freely within the abstract & anecdotal poles, thereby attaining some semblance of unification. Once the abstract material has emerged, it dominates the track, but anecdotal sounds are forever lurking at the fringes, more muted than before, but thereby becoming more allusive, encrusting the music with bells & chimes, until it returns to the fore for the closing minutes. As the track ends, we move back to the anecdotal extreme, & the stark unadorned sound of footsteps walking on gravel; such a world away from that with which most of the previous quarter of an hour has been preoccupied, yet not feeling out of place.

“Waiting Until Something Else Happens” goes further, seeking to integrate the two kinds of material more thoroughly. It opens in pure ambience, the music softly rising & falling, but noise quickly takes up position at the edges once again; over time, the noise begins to make inroads, its gestures adorning & ultimately overwhelming the more gentle tones beneath. They usher in the track’s central section, a protracted episode where field recordings made at an airport take centre stage, culminating in more noise, the combination of plane sounds & water, blurring the distinction between the raw & the cooked; it’s impossible to tell, in fact, what’s sonically ‘real’ & what’s not at moments like this. The final couple of minutes are a stylistic recapitulation of sorts, all ambience, an exercise in gorgeous shimmering.

From the first couple of tracks, it’s clear that unification works best when the sharp, anecdotal edge of the field recordings is blunted somewhat, & this is demonstrated early on in “The Street Of A Rainy, Gray Day”. It’s a much more complex track, the foreground in flux, both kinds of material juxtaposed in quick succession. Generic City‘s most effective moments are heard here; a sense of the abstract is what projects most, but one is constantly aware of fragments & gestures hinting at something familiar, tantalisingly kept just beyond the reach of recognition. Once again, this is diffused into a dense cloud of noise, before a strident chord, laden with pulsing overtones, appears, propelling the track in a new direction. For the rest of its duration, the impetus is maintained; field recordings often push to the front, yet for all their clarity, direct recognition remains difficult. Material constantly morphs back & forth, teasing the ear at the cusp of identity, one moment forming amorphous oscillations, another dissolving into a vast texture of busy street noise. There’s not one moment of this track that fails to engage & ignite the imagination, & it’s a very fine example indeed of the kind of fascinating interplay that can result from such disparate types of source material.

Generic City closes with “A Renewed Awareness of Home”, a mysterious slab of sound occupying a darker ambient world. The first four minutes are masterful; a viscous miasma is established, moving with the pace of tectonic plates, hypnotising the ear. The first occurence of something other comes as a shock (in fact, on first listening i actually believed the sound to have come from somewhere else); metallic strikes periodically blanch the surface of the ambient cloud, causing it to shift & alter in consistency. It’s magical stuff; unfortunately, the entrancing mood is emphatically broken by the ensuing abrupt appearance of chanting voices. In theory, such sounds ought to fit right in with the established soundworld; sadly, however, they jar unpleasantly, shattering the carefully balanced texture, the opening few minutes quickly lost & forgotten. The field recordings finally subside into another abstract episode, but it’s an altogether brighter one, & as such, only seems to worsen the overall effect.

This is, however, a very rare example of ill-judged/executed sound juxtaposition from these otherwise superb musicians; & despite the difficulties of the final track, Generic City is otherwise a tour de force of electroacoustic music. It’s really exciting to hear the anecdotal & the abstract co-exist in such a unified & fruitful way.

Autres Directions
Malgré la disparition tragique de Danielle Baquet-Long l’an passé, le souffle du duo américain Celer ne s’éteint pas. C’est la plus belle déclaration d’amour qui soit, une lettre sans fin que formule disque après disque la passion de son mari Will Long, qui fonde aujourd’hui Two Acorns, micro-label à la mémoire de ce qui n’a pas encore disparu. Les objets, les souvenirs, les sentiments. Generic City, première référence et nouvel album réalisé en collaboration avec le japonais Yui Onodera, est tout sauf un essai anecdotique sur le thème de la ville et de l’environnement. C’est une gueule d’atmosphères. Une chanson de la ville silencieuse. Une redécouverte de sons ordinaires et d’expériences ambient. Les sources s’y trouvent là où s’arrête le béton, dans le fantasme du citadin : la redécouverte du silence, du soi et de l’environnement à travers une société anonyme qui s’agglutine, d’un point à l’autre du globe. A l’image des premières minutes d’An Imaginary Tale Of Lost Vernacular, un essaim d’oiseaux qui piaille. La ville, le nombre et le bruit, remèdes miracles contre la solitude ? Certains reconnaissent la vie à travers le vacarme. D’autres y découvrent les bienfaits de la nature et du silence. Generic City se développe à la croisée de ces deux visions. Une madeleine de Proust.

Caleidoscoop
Het archief van de uit Los Angeles opererende groep Celer lijkt werkelijk onuitputtelijk. Celer is en blijft ogenschijnlijk bestaan uit het duo Will Long en Danielle Baquet-Long, waarvan de laatste vorig jaar helaas op 26-jarige leeftijd is overleden. Maar ze hebben nog zo ontzettend veel goed materiaal op de planken liggen, dat er net als Muslimgauze postuum nog vele albums op beider naam uitgebracht worden. Ze maken altijd uiterst sentimentele ambient, waarbinnen ze op diverse manieren variëren. Dit loopt uiteen van neoklassieke elementen, veldopnames en meanderende gitaarklanken. Yui Onodera maakt vanuit Japan eveneens combinaties met veldopnames, elektronica en akoestische instrumenten. Onlangs heeft hij, na al diverse solo albums te hebben gemaakt, een prachtige split uitgebracht met The Beautiful Schizophonic. Nu brengen Yui en Celer eindelijk hun langverwachte gemeenschappelijke album Generic City uit op het kersverse nieuwe label Two Acorns van Will Long . Ze hebben materiaal op afstand afgeleverd, hetgeen wellicht mooi terugkomt in de samples van vliegtuigen. De muziek komt tot stand met laptop, elektronica, piano, stem, gitaar, geluiden van strijkers, drones, gevonden objecten en uiteenlopende veldopnames van onder meer natuur- en stadsgeluiden. De vier lange, veelal melancholische landscapes die ze hier presenteren kennen een ongelooflijke diepgang en zijn van een prachtige desolaatheid. Vele details die ze als één warme adem de nacht insturen. Denk aan Stars Of The Lid, Seasons (Pre-din), Jasper TX, Deaf Center, Francisco Lopez, The Beautiful Schizophonic en Thomas Köner. Organische schoonheid om heerlijk bij weg te dromen.

De:Bug
Yui Onodera verfolgt in seiner Musik die Charakterisierung urbaner Räume und Passagen mittels Verbindung von Fieldrecordings und instrumentalen Drones. Eine Zusammenarbeit mit dem ganz ähnlich gelagerten amerikanischen Duo Celer, letztes Jahr an einem tödlichen Herzfehler seiner weiblichen Hälfte zerbrochen, lag nahe, und so tauschte man über mehrere Jahre Aufnahmen aus, die jetzt posthum auf dem neuen Label von Will Long erscheinen, Celers übriger Hälfte. Die zwei Stadtlandschaften, die hier verschmolzen werden, Tokyo und Los Angeles, haben wenig von der betriebsamen Fülle etwa von Gilles Aubrys Kairo oder gar Berlin, selbst dort, wo viele Menschen zu hören sind (oder, wie im abwegig scheinenden Einstieg, Wildgänse), oder große Maschinen (Flugzeugstarts): Alles wirkt offen, natürlich, naturnah. Ihr Gewicht beziehen die transpazifischen Spiegelungen des Trios aber aus den meisterhaften, schimmernden Drones, mit denen sie ihre “gewöhnliche Stadt” von einem traumartigen Licht durchtränken lassen, bei dem es mir wie selten kalt den Rücken runterläuft: ein ganz besonderer Zauber. Mein Liebling dieses Monats.

Dark Entries
Yui Onodera is het soort artiest die het liefst van al met field recordings te werk gaat, en hij drijft dit tamelijk ver want zowat alles wat deze mens te horen krijgt wordt voor het nageslacht bewaard maar vooral om te dienen voor zijn eigen experimentele projecten.

Die opnames kunnen gewoon natuurgeluiden zijn zoals een zwerm vogels die overvliegen maar ook de geciviliseerde wereld is een dankbare geluidsbron voor diens experimenten.

Zo gebeurt het dat hij soms gewoon op de uitkijk staat ergens in Los Angeles om geluiden uit de metro op te nemen of gewoonweg mensen die wat met elkaar te staan kletsen, of zelfs de regen die op het voetpad kletst is genoeg voor Yui om het te gaan gebruiken.

Het kan zelfs gebeuren dat deze lieve mens gewoon een vliegtuig opstapt om ergens in Azië biddende stemmen in één of andere tempel te gaan opnemen.

Eens thuis begint hij als een klein kind de opnames voor zich uit te spreiden en begint hij een selectie te maken van wat hij nu gaat gebruiken of niet. Rond deze selectie wordt een minimalistisch klanktapijtje geweven die meestal bestaat uit wat atmosferische drones, ook al is er plaats voor wat viool en een piano.

Deze cd mag er dan wel eentje van het experimentele soort zijn , toch merk je dat eigenlijk niet want deze “Generic City” is één groot auditief avontuur waarbij je gaat neerzitten en af gaat vragen wat het volgende geluid zal zijn dat je gehoor binnendringt.

Misschien is dit het soort muziek dat bepaalde mensen de wenkbrauwen doet fronzen maar hier is tenminste over nagedacht, en dat kunnen we nu niet bepaald van alles zeggen!

Vital Weekly
Two Acorns is a new label started by Will Long, one half of Celer. He deals with ‘things you can hold in your hand, or keep on your bookshelf, to keep these feelings, memories, and experiences. There is no replacement for the smell of a book, the spin of a CD player starting’. Hear hear. The label starts of with a collaborative release of his band Celer (which was Long and his partner Danielle Baquet-Long, who passed away) and Yui Onodera. The latter provides field recordings, electronics, guitar, violin, piano and musical box, while Celer holds the mixing board, cello, violin, piano, field recordings, theremin, electronics and ocarina. I am not sure but I don’t recall seeing many collaborations of Celer, but the result, four lengthy pieces work out quite well. Its probably everything you would expect from such a collaboration (you could debate wether that is good or bad), but the gentle, sustaining, of course drone – a word that can’t be avoided when talking about Celer nor Onodera – like atmospherics work quite well, but what seems interesting is that many of the field recordings go unprocessed into the mix. Lots of rain, water, animals, street sounds, stuff that seems to be picked up with contact microphones and such like, and they bathe quite well in the string of sounds woven together on the various instruments. They add a great spice to the music, which doesn’t stick that much in the world of ‘just’ drones too much. Beautifully ringing overtones, ‘heavy’ street sounds, air traffic and crackling of leaves: together they create a mighty fine aural landscape. Beautiful.