PREMIERE: TORIMIMASATAKA - Umbral [nuoac]
I remember when I first encountered the music of TORIMIMASATAKA, stumbling upon a live set uploaded by a favorite mix series. Within the first few minutes of listening, it was one of those digging moments where hours of searching for something to scratch that abstract itch paid off substantially. A quick browse of his SoundCloud & Bandcamp & all of the sudden I’d listened to only his music & live sets for the majority of the day. An experimental sound & visual artist from Osaka, Japan, TORIMIMASATAKA has operated on the fringe of our scene for more than a decade, stitching together fascinating compositions, which at times are also accompanied by his own visual work for a fully curated, immersive, multi-sensory experience. He was one of the artists who was featured at SIJIN’s Synthasia Open Air outside of Seoul last summer, which we mentioned in an earlier premiere. You can listen back to the recording of his live set here.
TORIMIMASATAKA’s music to me at times evokes the feeling of mechanical parts churning within a piece of machinery, or at other times it can be reminiscent of the sounds of a coral reef exploding with life, blithely crackling & bubbling away, or if you’ve ever sat & watched a large metal buoy noisily bobbing up & down in the ocean, it can sound a bit like that too - but from an underwater perspective. On the avant-garde end of the spectrum, his music is equally as dense as it is spaciously minimal. But it has a biological feel to it despite its electronic origins, like the rhythms of objects in motion in the natural world, governed only by the laws of physics. Every sound, fragments of samples & recordings have been carefully carved out, looped, compressed, shaped & positioned thoughtfully within the frequency spectrum & stereo field. The patterns are fluid, at moments lining up, other times overlapping a bit, like windshield wipers just slightly out of time with the tempo of music playing in your car. While you can hear bits & pieces of inspiration from artists such as Rastermusik’s Frank Bretschneider, Basic Channel, & Carrier, TORIMIMASATAKA has very much created his own sonic environment. He employs various dub techniques, with lots of tactile use of delay, feedback & tasteful reverb, emphasis on the embrace of noise, clicks & pops that are typically disposed of in other subgenres. Nothing is wasted, as he fills space with as few elements as possible.
Today we premiere the title track ‘Umbral’ off of a brand new limited cassette tape. It's the third release on TOROMIMASATAKA’s own nuoac imprint & is stylistically a bit more upfront with a noticeable bite than his previous releases. The full EP will be released on February 14th on his Bandcamp & readers in Australia can catch him on tour soon as he performs live in Sydney on release day & Melbourne on the 20th & 21st.
