Needless to say, Akio Suzuki is one of the representative sound artists in Japan. Many of his previous releases are sometimes interpreted as the work of a hermit or wizard creating beautiful sounds with his self-made musical instrument called “Analapos,” glass harmonica (De Koolmees), and stone flute, but the title of Suzuki’s first sound piece, aidan ni Mono wo Nageru (Throwing Things at the Stairs) at Nagoya Station in 1963, reflects his perspective on the noises in his work. This LP consists of two 2009 performances created with the use of radio. “Howling Objects,” with reverberation of a large museum space, and “a i sha,” in which the radio moves throughout the museum, can be noise itself, but they exist in accordance with the method of “Oto-date” and “Tadori” for which Suzuki has been continuously searching. Here, an approach to Suzuki’s hardcore sound in his nature is surely concentrated.
“It was at a solo exhibition in the Minamigaro gallery in Nihonbashi, Tokyo in 1976 when I held the premiere showing of “Howling Objects”. When I inserted the microphone into the cylinder of the stand type Analapos, and played echo sound, I was surprised to cause a howling. From that incident, I arranged iron “wappa” boxes (cylindrical containers formed by bending a thin plate), inserted two wireless microphones with echoes in the boxes and moved the position of the boxes to search for a sound. … In the performance I did at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, I used roll papers, microphones and radios to revisit “Howling Objects”. These radios and microphones used from the 1970s have been increasingly degraded in recent years, so this performance has become the last one. “a i sha” is a performance in which the two radios used in “Howling Objects” are loaded onto a small dolly and moved around the museum. After setting the radios to AM, selecting the noise wavelengths and tuning the two radios to be able to hear an interesting rhythm, I adjust the volume to an appropriate level and start. As the sound landscape changes by the directionality of radio by moving over to a corridor, wide space and a window, I share the sound field with the people who happen to be there by chance and the people chasing the dolly”. Akio Suzuki
Full-color cover photo on sleeve. New liner notes in Japanese and English by Suzuki. Limited edition of 250.