CHIB

moco

CD, Fat Cat

Chib is a female artist from Tokyo, Japan – now let your imagination run wild. Take the image us westerners have about Japanese, female artists and try to apply them. Usually, we are lost – but also fascinated – by the undecipherable symbolism and mysticism of modern Japanese artists. We like to feel the roots and connections to a traditional system of 5000 years of age and the way in which this heritage shapes and influences the piece of art we are looking at now, but also the transition into the digital age, the loss and the new-found riches that come along with that change of paradigms. We like to think that Japanese artists, especially female artists, are bound and tortured by their tradition and that their artistic will and meaning comes from the breaking of the dogmatic forms and rules (the picture of ritual suicide and loyalty to death culled from Samurai-movies springing back and forth in our heads). We connect Japanese art with obsessions and weirdness of all kinds, from painters who only use white “colour” via writers using the same idea over and over again to artists killing themselves after they have reached perfection in their craft.

From all these points we make up the picture of the Japanese artist as a deeply intellectual person, entangled in its very own metaphorical symbolism and obsessive work; more of an enigma to us than an understandable producer of art. Is that a valid picture? Is the urban teenager in Tokyo less westernised than the urban teenager in London or Los Angeles? There are sound-designers and noise-artists all around the world, whose work is enigmatic, hardly understandable and also reflecting the change from the analogue to the digital world. There are examples from all over the world, from the subtle noise of Asmus Tietchens to the intuitive compositions of Sylvain Chauveau, from the drug-riddled noise-rock of Monno to the architecture made into music of Russian Novel 23. Just check the reviews on this website to see what I mean.

What makes Japanese music always so much more obsessive and intricate? I think of Minamo, Kazumasa Hashimoto or Guilty Connector of late. The high time of Japan Noise (Merzbow, Aube, Masonna, Keji Haino, Hijokodan) is over, and the artistic / musical world has been pushed that one step forward through the fires of white noise and extreme frequency attacks. The new revolutions are hidden in smaller portions, in details and cracks, in miniatures and thumbnails of music. Every little piece of avantgardist music brings a small step closer to a new orchestral and symphonic dogma, ready to be destroyed in the next step. Sounds have been classified as just that: sounds. Whether they come from real instruments, synthetic instruments or from natural sources is of no importance anymore. Software is able to emulate the sounds of vintage equipment while other software enables the producer to move analogue sounds up the scale (?) to sounding digital, while most avantgarde-musicians work on destroying or at least scratching the notion of pure sound.

Maybe all of these thoughts are really too far-reaching for Chib. Maybe she is really a lonely, reserved and introverted sound-collector, who puzzles over the connection of some notes played on a keyboard to some sounds recorded at some corner of the street, or how to fit a high tingling sound, that somehow started to ring from her hard-disc with old violin-sounds from a cheap synthie. Just our regular otaku in a suburb of Tokyo, trying to get over ten years of rigid piano-lessons (we always imagine lessons in Japan as rigid, don’t we?) and on the search for meaning by obeying to made-up rituals and obsessions. The effect on the listener would be quite the same, though, searching for the background of the obvious beauty of a piece of modern art that hides much more than it gives away, sways gently in our imagination by softly combining polar opposites as well as siblings into intricate paintings made of sound. (The reason why painting has left music so far behind in its evolution towards modernity and new dogmas: paintings are easier to ignore. The recipient decides how much time he wants to spend with each painting.) At some point the distinction between art or therapy for the artist becomes obsolete.