Nobuto Suda: Sensitive Fields
Tobira Records

To say Kyoto, Japan-based Nobuto Suda has been productive of late is an obvious understatement. Five recordings appeared in 2010: Bottom of Pocket on Rural Colours, Ecotone on Somehow-Recordings, and three on on Tobira Records (the label he co-manages with Hakobune), Bloom, Garden of Ghosts, and now Sensitive Fields, which splits two twenty-minute settings across the C40 cassette's sides (fifty copies).

“Sensitive Fields” is an epic vaporous ambient-drone of the celestial kind characterized by immense swells of gauzy and gaseous form. Similar in style, side B's “Blue of Sky” is, if anything, even more epic in the relentlessness of its intensity and majestic radiance. All kinds of muffled sounds emanate from the tracks' centers, almost as if they're struggling to break free from their respective vortices. The material largely remains at a consistent pitch and billows at the level of a controlled roar or howl but isn't abrasive in the way such terms might suggest. Given the ethereal nature of Sensitive Fields' material, it would be easy to imagine it being used to accompany the sequence near the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey where Dave Bowman's spaceship hurtles across the vast reaches of space, witnessing heavily saturated colour landscapes on unnamed planets and other cosmological phenomena as he does so.

February 2011