Hiroaki MINAMI
“Kumo no ito” – Obscure Tape Music of Japan vol.19

“Kumo no Ito (The Spider’s Thread)” (1977). In 1977. I started the project of a musical piece for a female narrator and 4-channel electronic sounds with the text of the well-known Akutagawa novel. I worked with the hand-made analogue synthesizer which had been installed two years before in my home studio in Tokyo. Needless to say, the editing task was proceeded without the digital machines. I worked with the recorded tapes together with the scissors and the splicing tape. It was the resonance adding apparatus that I operated the resonance which was very important as sound effect. The part for the synthesizer was made manually ; recording the short fragments and collecting them onto one tape through several tape recorders. My studio was full of a lot of tape fragments. I think the situation in those days was stupendous but I didn’t feel distress. The manual procedure was usual at that time, so I could rather enjoy the process of advancing towards the goal step by step.
“Chaos” (1966-2012). In 1966 I composed a piece of concrete music titled Taiyo-fu (Solar Wind). It was to be staged as a performance of Tokyo-based Mieko Fuji Dance Company. The dance performance participated in the National Arts Festival of Agency for Cultural Affairs. The stage concept was to create a new modern dance, which suggest that the sun would be perpetually pouring all the energy of light, heat and wind to the earth. I made the music by manipulating the materials of the recorded instrumental sounds, not of the concrete sounds. With the idea of applying the editing and modifying methods of concrete music to the recorded instrumental sounds, I had started with composing a lot of fragments, and then I played them and recorded in our recording studio. Some students of Tokyo College of Music, where I worked as a teacher, helped me as musical performers. The recorded sound materials were operated in my private studio. Manipulating several tape recorders, I tried to produce the sounds that could not be identified as the original instruments. Thus I created out the seventy minute stage music. Fifty years have passed and the digital technology is now easy to access. But I remember the process of my manual operation and I can’t wipe the commitment to the music of Taiyo-fu. Nevertheless, I think the music is too monotonous to be appreciated without dance. So I re-constructed a piece with the sound materials of Taiyo-fu. The basic idea concerns the cosmic world and the title of the piece is Chaos. This Chaos comes from my illusion about the primordial universe.