TOKYO — The Suidōbashi metro station was full of Tokyo rockers on the final Saturday in October for an Oasis reunion live performance on the Tokyo Dome, a landmark baseball stadium throughout the road. I, nevertheless, wandered across the block onto a nondescript residential avenue looking for out a constructing with a secreted Ftarri signal. That may be a cramped basement efficiency area with room for 20 folding chairs and a small stage on which there have been two tables arrange for electronics.
Cabinets alongside the partitions had been stuffed with lots of of obscure CDs and DVDs on the market that includes improvisors and avant-gardists. This sold-out occasion featured younger sound artist Elico Suzuki, who goes by suzueri. She had that morning made little clear plastic cubes with digital circuitry inside. When she pushed them round her desk, they emitted whistles and wails, which a giggly suzueri accompanied by singing right into a microphone, including her personal charmingly oddball whistles and wails.
Subsequent to her was a 72-year-old cult-legend laptop computer composer wearing black and carrying his trademark fedora, conveying ageless cool. There was no manner to determine what Carl Stone was as much as. He sat and stared at his display, positioned away from the viewers, as inscrutable as somebody at a restaurant engaged on a laptop computer.
There have been no wheres or whys to what got here out of his iPad. Stone transforms and distorts sounds he data of our sonic surroundings as radically and as astonishingly as a sculptor does with stone.
Of their hourlong improvisation, the laptop-ist appeared to avuncularly information the giddy cube-ist, whereas additionally indulging her excited climactic outbursts. The improvisation petered out after greater than an hour with no sense of arrival, simply an agreeable sensation of being OK in wherever ambient world you had simply landed.
Stone, who will current a brand new work on the Japanese American Cultural & Group Middle in Little Tokyo on Thursday evening, doesn’t match into ambient music (he’s far too resourceful for that) or any style. He recurrently excursions the world, and he ceaselessly performs with a variety of instrumentalists and singers worlds aside. Per week later, I heard Stone in one other improvisational night at a considerably bigger and extra established experimental Tokyo theater the place he grounded a bizarrely incongruous trio that included a veteran Japanese smooth-jazz, ambient-friendly saxophonist and a younger, radical, frighteningly intense butoh dancer.
Regardless of all this — or due to it — Stone occurs to be a quintessential Los Angeles composer. He’s from the San Fernando Valley, the place he grew up with an enthusiasm for classical music and opera, together with craving for urbanity. That led to toying round with progressive Sixties pop music after which attending CalArts, the place he studied with pioneering digital music composers.
However Stone — chatting over a beer and snacks in an out-of-the-way Tokyo alley after we had attended the refreshingly modernist Dairakudakan butoh firm’s model of “Rite of Spring” — says he discovered revelation as a lot from a pupil job within the CalArts library as on the synthesizer.
Carl Stone in Tokyo, the place he’s been residing for 25 years.
(Mark Swed / Los Angeles Occasions)
His library job was to dub each LP within the assortment onto cassettes. This included uncommon discs of world music, arcane full sequence of early classical music, Ravi Shankar enjoying Indian ragas, Led Zeppelin and all the pieces in between.
“I heard all this incredible music,” Stone explains. “I loved it and still do. But what really changed my life was that this was a Sisyphean task I could never finish because there was new stuff coming faster than I could copy it.
“So I proposed that they set up multiple turntables and multiple tape recorders, which I could use in parallel. I would then listen to three different albums at the same time, and I began to notice all kinds of insane collisions when you would happen to have some African music on the front table, something entirely different begin to play on turntable 2 and then Berg or Stockhausen on turntable 3. And that has remained the path I’m on to this day.”
That path led to him founding with different CalArts grads the Unbiased Composers Assn., which placed on live shows in artwork galleries and elsewhere round L.A. within the late Nineteen Seventies and early ‘80s. Stone also became a familiar figure as music director of the Pacifica FM station KPFK. He served a new music organizer and entrepreneur, which included running L.A.‘s New Music America festival in 1984.
All the while, Stone created L.A. soundscapes that he named after his favorite Asian restaurants. His restlessness, be it musical, culinary or otherwise cultural, took him to San Francisco and New York. In 1984, Japanese pianist Aki Takahashi commissioned a piano piece, and he made his first trip to Japan, instantly falling in love with the country. After spending more and more time in Japan, he moved to Tokyo in 2001 when invited to teach electronic music at a university near Nagoya.
All along, Stone had been transforming urban environments in his electronics, always adapting to the latest technology. In Japan, the sound environment is about as rich, particularly in urban landscapes, as can be imagined. Stone wandered around, with a recorder hidden in his fedora, documenting and then disassembling all that, as well as what he recorded in his travels. He has also kept an apartment in L.A., where he regularly returns and performs in new music venues like Arts + Archives downtown.
With his new hourlong solo piece for JACCC, however, Stone has an opportunity to put both worlds together. The inspiration for “Daimatsu” is the Goma Fire Ceremony, which is performed at the Koyasan Temple around the corner from JACCC the last Sunday of every month and, in a long-standing Little Tokyo tradition, on New Year’s Day.
Daimatsu means pine tree, with all of the implications a pine can have aesthetically, culturally and spiritually in Japanese tradition. Stone says he’s taken as his uncooked materials not solely sounds from the Koyasan Temple but in addition such sounds of Japan because the boiling water of a tea ceremony. The best way he then works, normally late at evening in his small Tokyo residence, is to attempt for ma, the area between sounds and what Stone describes as “the intangible area between the unrecognizable and the unfathomable.”
Stone additionally says that the extra ma penetrates his work, the much less busy it turns into. That was obvious in how he saved what may simply have grow to be a minor catastrophe at Za Koenji, the venue the place he was joined by saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu and butoh dancer Taketeru Kudo for “Origin Theory.”
Taketeru utilized his arresting physicality to 70 exhausting minutes portraying what gave the impression to be a violent transitioning from one existence to a different. Not inaccurately did he describe this as “a regeneration through palpitations and blood circulation.” Shimizu is an exploratory jazz musician who has of late gained reputation for his tv scores and inoffensively ambient music that employs soporific electronics. They’re an odd, incompatible couple.
For Taketeru, sound existed as bodily stimulus. Shimizu responded by impressively channeling his earlier, extra progressive model. On the identical time, the saxophonist had introduced his personal laptop computer that produced anodyne drones that intruded on Stone. It took a Stone throw to search out the ma.
Stone’s iPad, with its open sonic complexity, created a way of area, a roomy aural soundscape during which jazz and butoh grew to become components not egos, not bigger than life, simply extra life, the merrier. Due to Stone, three human turntables spinning directly went from competitively filling area to, within the spirit of ma, making area.
