MASAYA KATO - Trace Of Voices

Illuha, Sawako, Moskitoo, Gutevolk, Miki Yui, and the list could go on forever: ambient sound art is undoubtedly one of the cornerstone trends of Japanese experimental electronic music. And, as with almost every art form they've tackled, artists from the Land of the Rising Sun have managed to craft a distinctive, instantly recognizable take on the genre, built on crystalline sonic cleanliness, an unmistakable underlying restraint, an almost obsessive attention to form, and a kind of genuine fixation on aesthetic balance. In shaping his own soundworld, young Masaya Kato, Time Released Sound's latest discovery, fully honors the founding traits of Japanese sound art.

But he adds one more element to the mix: organic sounds, authentic and unsimulated, placing himself in continuity with the piano explorations of Ryuichi Sakamoto, who has long since jumped aboard the digital-art bandwagon. And if anything, he pushes even further in a subtractive direction, moving along lines not too dissimilar from those of the latest Thomas Köner. “Trace Of Voices”, his first proper album after the cassette “Coagulation” two years ago, is thus a work of scientific, lucid sonic contemplation, in which however – unlike the approach always championed by the German master, where the presence of an object has always been necessary – it is the sound itself that observes, outlines and recognizes itself.

A choice as bold as it is limiting, depending on one's point of view, one that unfolds carrying within it an unresolvable internal contradiction, and not by chance. The main risk, namely monotony, is skilfully overcome by varying the expressive means. Where subject and object coincide, it is precisely the latter that builds in intensity, moving from the placid, pristine atmospheres in dialogue with silence of the first three movements and the fifth, to the warmer, more vividly coloured flows reminiscent of Marsen Jules and Pjusk respectively in the fourth and sixth, right up to the (avoidable) atonal drift of the final two, just a few steps from “Cendre”. What comes through loud and clear, though, is precisely the absence of the subject and its sensibility, a void that cold generative rigour fails to fill.

The underlying idea, in short, is decidedly compelling: finding a sound capable of evolving on its own – with the artist intent solely on providing the initial input, the spark – while doing so with ever-changing means, tools and approaches. But if the fundamental condition of ambient music is its character, whether born of the artist's inner experience, of its status as a sound participating in its surrounding environment, of its reproducing or contemplating that environment, or of its representing a self-evolving, autonomous environment, this “trace of voices” lacks precisely the ability to make itself heard and become a protagonist, a subject of the environment to which it belongs. A vicious circle that, we're sure, the talented Kato will soon be able to break.

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17/01/2015