MITCHELL AKIYAMA

If night is a weed and day grows less

CD, Sub Rosa

Lots of electronic avantgarde music clouds itself in mystery to raise its importance and impact. Mitchell Akiyama has nothing to hide. His beautiful explorations into the voids between classical sounds and most modern noise are open and bare to scrutinization. Everywhere it is obvious which sounds have been recorded, which have been mutilated and which have been grown from zeros and ones completely. But this new academic step also provides warmth, naturality and emotionality in a quite big range. The wild, the introspective and the chaotic stand up to show their grasp on one and the same piece (or rather four pieces). Akiyama doesn’t leave you puzzling on what happened and if you will ever hear what you just heard again, even if you are still wearing the same headphones and pressed the replay button right now. The answers are obvious but the effect is so much more; especially beautiful.

In poetry, the words hidden make up as much of the impression as the words put down to paper, and I am not talking about the process of weeding out the unsuitable syllables that give meaning to those left over, but about the unspoken connections being drawn to complex ideas and thoughts at the borders of the pictures painted, that make up the bigger impression and thus the art. Talking about pictures, poetry and art in general comes easy with Mitchell Akiyama. Not only because he himself has a history of various genres and subgenres of the world of art he has worked in. It is more that, music that has presented itself globally in places like Barcelona (at the Sonar festival) or Montreal (at the Mutek festival, with Canada slowly becoming one of the leading countries for progressive, avantgarde or fringe electronic music, see Vitamins For You or Five Point Fincastle for that matter) and which is enshrouded in a cloud of mysterious beauty and encoded in an invigorating language, that stretches from the codas of (modern) classical music to the abstract phonemes of pure noise and glitches, such music has an obvious tendency to be discussed in academic and theoretical terms. And fittingly and well becomingly so, I’d like to add.

Akiyama uses the sounds of four piano pieces to create eight very differing tracks of purified liquid sounds that use violin sounds and syncopated chords as well as jazzy bass-piano-lines as well as pure noise – from electronically produced white noise to digital glitches to naturally recorded sounds discarded and refigured – and in the best moments all together or at least in close proximity. The first highlight of that kind, track number three, accordingly named “with hope that” and attributed to Steve Reich, no less, has all that and is bound to become the centre of musical discussion in the apt circles. But the beat-driven pulse of this track, the multi-levelled working of the various layers of sounds and instruments in one complex (almost chamber) piece of music works also on the purely emotional level. And it is the intuitive, more felt than senses level which spawns the most interesting thoughts and connections. Of course, the details demand attention, and there are details aplenty, from the rising noises and ripples that lead into the record in the opening track and their finely constructed interplay to the comparison of natural noise (e.g. from the corpus of the piano itself underneath the notes played in “a lesser path growing” (track #4) and the digitally produced and reworked noise of “ill n’y a pas de silence” (track #5); the latter slowly growing into a dynamic exploration of pianochords that slowly grow out of the noise, then abruptly change atmosphere only to step back into the old place only in more collected and ordered form.

The tiny parts make up the big ones. In case of “if night is a weed and day grows less” it is the tiny, almost miniscule sounds and soundbits that make up the overall atmosphere of mysterious warmth and organic growth. It takes some time and open ears to really enjoy these pieces as beautiful and laid back background music – and that is good that way, because music like this demands attention – but once the listener has managed to get accustomed to the beauty of noise, the aesthetic formulas behind digital clitches and the structural dynamic of modern classical strings and piano-concertos, the world has opened to a new dimension and that is when this album really starts to work and starts to be fun. There is a lot of avantgarde music that draws its phenomenality from its mysteriousness. From Kadaa to Fibla or from Anderegg to Harpages (or any other name of that genre, these are just the ones that came to my mind in the five seconds it took to write them down), and back again across the globe, there is a lot of music that runs almost entirely on the notion of entering an unknown world that will lead the listener astray to new shores and experiences and thereby enlightening him in some way or other. And I would never put that down, quite contrary, music that manages to do that is better than most other sounds pressed into discs. But Mitchel Akiyama’s true achievement is getting the music into the listener and not, as usually, drawing the listener into the music. Repeated piano figures and melodies help the listener to find his way through this dreamland, that is oh so real and known, with known sounds and atmospheres rising up here and there and new ones growing in between. And suddenly the almost random piano-chords paired with interferences and static noise coupled in “fall away fall away” (track #7) are both beautiful and avantgarde, harmonious and challenging. Like a trance in the here and now, a pragmatic trip into the twilight zone that is everyday routine.

www.subrosa.net

05/2004