focus: default #4 – 30.04.2023 with Nozomu Matsumoto, Marija Rasa & busf (pt. 1)
Our next event is happening on Sunday the 30th of April with performances by Nozomu Matsumoto, Marija Rasa (a.k.a. emer), busf and Jung An Tagen & Eric Frye.
Our upcoming event is getting closer and therefore we would like to share with you a selection of works made by the artists set to perform. This focus newsletter, the first of the two centered around our fourth installment, highlights works by Nozomu Matsumoto, Marija Rasa and busf.
default#4 also includes a dinner session, carefully put together by Trang Hà & Jelle van den Brink, which requires a separate reservation (to be made here). The dinner will be accompanied by a listening dj set from Yunque.
Nozomu Matsumoto
Nozomu Matsumoto (b. 1990, JP) is a Tokyo-based artist and curator. His work has been presented at galleries such as Yamamoto Gendai and Talion Gallery and he has curated for The Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. Nozomu debuted with ’Climatotherapy’ on The Dead of Rave label in 2018, which was also developed into a performance installation with long-time collaborator Nile Koetting, shown in ‘ASSEMBLY’ at Somerset House, London in the same year.
Since then, Nozomu released a consistent stream of human/inhuman, hyperreal music, of a clinically emotive clarity, blending Amazon’s Polly’s text-to-speech, midi orchestration and Japanese environmental new age-esque ambient aesthetics to a result that often embodies reflective, intimate, sonic commentaries on current states of our technologically enhanced society.
Other sound design work includes ‘FUKAMI, une plongée dans l'esthétique japonaise’ at Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild, 2018’ and Nile Koetting’s ‘Remain Calm’, a installation that was initially commissioned by Kunstverein Göttingen (Germany) and has since been exhibited at Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Centre Pompidou X West Bund Museum (Shanghai), Shedhalle (Zürich), Sharjah Art Foundation (Sharjah), Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hongkong) and Taiwan National Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan). ‘Remain Calm’ was later released on vinyl via the INFO label (link).
some of our favorite releases from Nozomu include:
Phonocentrism
(Long Form Editions, 2019)
Nozomu followed-up his 2018 debut ‘Climatotherapy’ on The Death of Rave with the collaborative, sound bank-heavy ‘Phonocentrism’. He described the release as ‘an environmental forecast for streaming – reconstruction of destructive lyrics and sound’.
Longform Editions usually releases ambient or drone pieces that take their time and ask for a certain, focused listening mode. Nozomu’s commissioned release however was, surprisingly, ‘a wild but precisely-cut collage of styles and feelings’. According to the label ‘Phonocentrism works as a kind of sonic commentary on the way we listen to music, more than an approach to deep listening.’ (Longform Editions interview in Crack Magazine, 2019).1
Sustainable Hours – Soundtrack For Installation By Nile Koetting
(The Death of Rave, 2020)
His second record for The Death of Rave transformed punk lyrics nihilism into hauntological text-to-speech ambient, ‘recontextualising antiquated anxieties about the future to score a snapshot of the commercial dystopia of the present.’2
‘Sustainable Hours’ served as a soundtrack for an installation with Nile Koetting, as the title suggests. Boomkat described the installation in their LP-review as the following3:
‘Nile Koetting’s 2016 installation (….), comprised a selection of devices - a wireless LAN system, Dyson humidifier, air purifier, aroma diffuser, 5.1ch home theater speaker, line array speaker system, and a robot - purchased by the artist after recommendation by Amazon.com’s algorithm. The items were placed in an “organic environment” (as on the LP cover) intended to reflect a sense of timeless space inspired by punk’s ethos of “No Future”, with Nozomu’s soundtrack of meditative pads and playfully perpendicular but poignant placement of drily synth-voiced punk lyrics acting as a sort of Situationist détournement of chronology and context (…) most crucially, there’s an underlying wit and soul to Nozomu’s conception of ambient music that essentially resonates with the ironies and psychic anxieties of the modern mindset and makes this soundtrack very special in its own, strangely blue light.’
This 2017-mix for AVYSS is recommended as an accompanying listening, preceding this record by combining these lyrical explorations with selections of orchestral and midi grandeur.
Immunotherapy
(The Death of Rave, 2022)
Nozomu succeeds in merging the synthetic with the all-too-human, which comes to the foreground even more in his latest record ‘Immunotherapy’. Five consecutive, rather short tracks work towards a contrastingly 13-minute lasting digital pseudo-choral opus. ‘Filippo Pacini’, an haunting ode to the c.19th Italian anatomist, makes the record, after preceding narrations on ‘public panic attacks’ and 'diseases of affluence’, result into a seemingly ever-going solace. Upholding both feelings of bliss and melancholia4, the record forms a new stage in his personal, novel music, while exuding a hauntological take on Japanese environmental, ambient and koto music.
Marija Rasa
Lithuania-born, Brussels-based musician and sound artist Marija Rasa explores in her practice sound spatiality, texture, and fragility. Since her studies at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague, she has been composing pieces for multichannel speaker setups. In these compositions she carefully sculpts fictional soundscapes out of delicate noise, harmonies, field recordings from quiet places and voice. Incorporating her spatial music, and attentive micro-montage practices, Marija Rasa will present her album ‘sea salt’, released under the alias emer on the Chicago-based label Lillerne Tapes in March 2023.
Marija has a long standing collaborative practice with electroacoustic duos ugne&maria and forgotten plants and is a monthly resident at Kiosk Radio and Radio Vilnius.
Her quadrophonic performance will center around multi-layered sonority that delves into the Kintai (Lithuania) reserve, adding new gestures to the crackling and gurgling ones that are already encoded in the recordings.
Marija’s audio-works include:
sea salt
(Lilerne Tapes, 2023)
‘sea salt’ contains six intimate and moving tracks that take space and time to evoke something intimate, yet inviting. As the label frames it correctly: ‘Distant, engrossing vocals and warm melodies blend effortlessly with hypnotic rhythms – all captured within a soft and airy world. Big tunes delivered with care and with much consideration.’
microlands I
(self-released, 2023)
Microlands are multi-layered sonorities, originally written for multichannel audio setups. Composed of de-constructed recordings from quiet environments, sculpted into new fictional spatial soundscapes. The recording used in -18ºCº was made in Utena, Lithuania by Audrius Šimkūnas on December, noon, minus 18 Celsius. 111A is the number of the house in The Hague from which the courtyard was recorded during a quiet rainy night.
busf
busf is a musician, researcher, and sound artist based in the Netherlands, who explores rhythms going off the grid, spectral effects, and field recordings.
Presenting a new 4-ch performance at default, busf’s work brings a personal take on sound making and capturing that often seems to be informed by computer-music and system-based aesthetics. However instead of feeling sterile, the music that is to be found on busf’s website and bandcamp entails a certain openness, curiosity and attentiveness.
a selection of busf’s audio-works:
5+7 (2022)
2 (2022)
pipe (2022)
rains (2021)
‘Korolistavi is a small village in the mountains of south Georgia. This mountain is also called ‘Crying mountain’ cos of tropical microclimate with huge rains for two summer months, people call them rotten months. The area is full of sounds and it feels strange to play music there. I put off the pipe from the roof to have rows with water falling on different cans. It provided me with rhythmic patterns. I was influenced by drummer Marshal Trammel, so I was trying to find a way to play drum structures like him.’5
wizard spoon – CODE178
(CO-DEPENDENT, 2019)
under the ‘fm 8’ section on her website it states: ‘Snippets from jams with BSW.’ CODE178 was released in 2019 on the ‘collaborative label’ CO-DEPENDENT.
worth checking out too, is this Pulsar live recording; ‘from a show in Kyiv organised by Kyiv Noise. Together with BSW on New Pulsar Generator by Marcin Pietruszewski.’
another focus newsletter will follow later this week, highlighting works by Eric Frye & Jung An Tagen, who both are playing a solo set as bringing a live adaption of their collaborative avant-acid project at default#4.
default is a sound series taking place in The Hague, The Netherlands ❦ overview upcoming installments - instagram - fb - newsletter archive
https://crackmagazine.net/tag/longform-editions/
https://www.factmag.com/2020/05/04/nozomu-matsumoto-sustainable-hours/
https://boomkat.com/products/sustainable-hours
https://boomkat.com/products/immunotherapy
https://rewineseleste.github.io/rains/