textura

Albums
17 Pygmies
Ælab
Aeroc
Adrian Aniol
Aleph
Artificial Memory Trace
B. Schizophonic / Onodera
Blue Fields
The Boats
Canyons of Static
Celer
drog_A_tek
Fennesz + Sakamoto
Marcus Fischer
Les Fragments de la Nuit
Daniel Thomas Freeman
From the Mouth of the Sun
Goth-Trad
Karol Gwózdz
Mark Harris
Inverz
Kingbastard
Tatsuro Kojima
Robert Lippok
Maps and Diagrams
Merzouga
Message To Bears
mpld
The New Law
Nuojuva
Octave One
Petrels
Puresque
Refractor
Lasse-Marc Riek
Jim Rivers
Dennis Rollins
Scuba
Shigeto
Susurrus
Jason Urick
VVV
Williamette
Windy & Carl
Zomes

Compilations / Mixes
DJ-Kicks: The Exclusives
Future Disco Volume 5
King Deluxe Year One
Phonography Meeting
Pop Ambient 2012

EPs
Blixaboy
Matthew Dear
Fovea Hex
Jacksonville
Kurzwellen 0
Phasen
Pascal Savy

Tatsuro Kojima: 16g
Audiobulb Records

Like many a label, Audiobulb is devising innovative strategies to make its physical products more valuable and distinctive. In the case of Japan-based Tatsuro Kojima's 16g, that means adorning the cover of each CD release with an individual cover photograph by Kojima and including a duplicate photo within the packaging that includes a signed and personalized message from the artist. Put simply, each physical CD is unique.

Of course the release has more going for it than the presentation concept. It's very much in the tradition of delicate moodscaping of the kind we've come to expect from Japanese artists associated with Schole and other such labels. Field recordings figure prominently in the hour-long recording, while piano, vibraphone, harp, synthetic sounds, and glitchy textures recur within its eleven electro-acoustic meditations, which Kojima composed between 2009 and 2011. Airy, multi-hued, and translucent by design, the settings are intricate and densely detailed affairs, comprised as they are of tinkling musical fragments and textural micro-slivers (consider the abundance of creaks and whirrs pulsing through the otherwise glimmering “Composition3” as one example of many).

“0002” establishes the relaxed tone of the album in pairing atmospheric vibes accents and drones with the crunch of footsteps trudging through snow-covered fields (a sound that re-emerges in the penultimate “043 Fredricson Mix”). The addition of Aya Fukaya's breathy voice (even if reduced to a series of wave-like stutters) to “Out Noise” lends the glitch-heavy piece a distinguishing character that separates it from the others; “0818” likewise stands out for the bright vibraphone accents that resonate alongside the track's textural interplay. The album reaches its fullest culmination in the closing piece, “Composition6,” an almost twelve-minute setting that unites the various strands of Kojima's sound world into a single, vibrant dreamscape. Text accompanying the release notes that Kojima aspired in the recording to “evoke the feel and sensation of paper-thin ice or richly-coloured, yet transparent air,” and in this regard 16g clearly succeeds.

February 2012