Review Summary: Pinpricks of selfhood and a universe of middle-distance
Last week I took a ferry to a small island in the Seto Inland Sea, cycled to a lay-by devoid of any landmark save for a bus stop and a nebulous Google Maps indicator, and hiked up an overgrown trail, either in its off-season or abandoned wholesale. It would have been impossible to see where the trail began if it hadn't been chained off, and even that was inconspicuous: up we went. Someone in my group had read that somewhere up this way was a sculpture by the artist Mariko Mori. We were going to find it, if for no other reason than to convince ourselves that it was there at all.
This did not take long. Though the path disappeared entirely at points, it eventually opened into a hilltop clearing, chiefly occupied by a pond and densely wooded on all sides. The pond's width seemed to allow for sunlight at almost any daylight hour, and in the very centre was a single tear-shaped slab of opalescent glass, stood on an otherwise bare crest of rock as though it had been wept directly from the heavens, fused together in the stratosphere, and embedded itself where it fell for eternity to come, an austere memorial to some unglimpsable cosmic tragedy. There was no wind in the trees, nor a ripple across the pond. We had nothing to look at but the sculpture until I uncovered an explanatory plaque from the nearby foliage — reading this, it turned out that my first impression was surprisingly accurate: the artist synced her artwork with a live data feed from an inland observatory such that it would glow in response whenever the observatory detected the neutrino burst from a supernova, brought to pass by a solar collapse. This was a place to mark the death of stars: the surface of the pond was a theatre that would react to their final moments, catching the light from the artwork and superimposing it over our own sky. Stare into that pond at the right time at night, and our familiar constellations would be drowned out under an illumination from an unknowably distant corner of the galaxy. Or so I imagined.
Shock horror, nothing at all happened while we were there; a star could have expired five minutes ago for all we knew (supernovas are one-per-century in the Milky Way, though I suspect the observatory has wider coverage). No fancy lights — what we were confronted by was more food for thought overshadowed by the looming threat of a light going out forever in a corner of another galaxy we had never so much as heard of. According the plaque, the artwork was supposed to affirm our link to the universe, but to me it seemed impossibly lonesome, a stray connection between three unlikely corners of the world, each astoundingly solitary in three entirely different ways (even the observatory connecting the sculpture to outer space is at the bottom of a mineshaft in one of Japan's only landlocked prefectures). As I walked back down the trail, every overgrown shrub, every protruding bamboo shaft, every inopportune spider web served as a reminder that whatever connection we had made with the cosmos was unfathomably tenuous, that the world is made up more of emptiness than whatever bonds it together, and that being confronted by this through the fragility, decay, refraction, delay, neglect and blind chance that underpin our more far-reaching bonds can be as profound as whatever connections we do make across them. We've all turned our imagination to trees falling unheard in distant forests at one point or another; Mariko Mori's backwater space-tear just forced me to apply a vast new scale to those thoughts.
If that's not enough Bigness of the Universe/Tiny Pinpricks of Individual Existence/Improbability of Remote Connections in the Face of the Transience of Life for one day, then, well, here's your grist for the mill. Hiroshi Minami and Eiko Ishibashi's
GASPING_SIGHING_SOBBING might not be steeped in those themes as explicitly or exhaustively as the Mori sculpture, but there's enough overlap and nebulous middle distance between the two that the former is as good a way as any to process the latter. This album is the sound of past-tense comfort ambience, the flickering ghost of a waveform that could once have been wholesale cafe jazz (albeit more wistful ECM for melancholy novel-clutchers than background bustle for warm-blooded catch-ups). It plays like it's been on repeat for years in an abandoned space station, in a dead mall, in a disused industrial freezer; it's an echo of intimacy bouncing from wall to wall in a space that has shut its doors to human contact entirely. Just listening to it feels like an encroachment on some long-sealed space, a pocket of a galaxy never meant for human eyes.
How does one sound like any of those things to begin with? Well. Veteran jazz pianist Minami performance lays the foundation here, periodically supported by bassist Daisuke Ijichi: his performance is central to each piece, but even then he seems to wander the album's confines dazedly more than he lays claim to them outright, as he orbits sombre motifs, variates his inflections and inserts brief asides, once in a whooe away the album's liminal trappings with a disarming chord change right when it seems to border on the purgatorial. All this is evidenced by the extraordinary second track "CAFE CIRCLE", a piece that seems to unpick itself and draw itself back together every other second, stumbling on fresh shades of warmth or melancholy with each oscillation.
Minami's spangled reveries are substantive to hold up on their own terms – it's easy to imagine the likes of "PARK" on a plaintive solo piano album – but the record's most distinctive qualities stem from the way Ishibashi feeds into his performance. Better known as an acclaimed film composer (including for the Oscar-winning
Drive My Car), here she proves her worth as a mainstay in Tokyo's improv scene, complementing Minami's piano reverie with sinuous synth layers, echoing him, coiling herself around his refrains, smothering him in the buzz of synthlines or the groan of bells, brushing his reverie against the creaking, hissing and chatter of quotidian field recordings, gently shaking the frame so as to make us aware how fragile the work at hand is. One shuts their mouth and tries not to breathe too hard. At points the friction between Minami and Ishibashi is an artsy stand-in for radio interference, a veil of decay that supersedes the album's melody and paints a lonesome portrait with aesthetics alone; at others it's a catalyst for every melancholic overtone in the piano track, a note-to-note exaggeration of an already fragile soundscape. Every touch Ishibashi employs to estrange the flow of music from Minami's performance only serves to reinforce its most precarious, humane qualities: she presents his notes as a series of unfathomably distant pinpricks of light that could never have been retrieved for us were it not by her hand. That question of space arises again, of connection and disconnection, both of which are key to the album's appeal. Though I've found it endlessly repayable, I would hate to be trapped hearing it in any of the spaces this record evokes — the prospect of a destitute space cafe is lonely enough without this kind of soundtrack. Much like the Mariko Mori artwork and however much other great art, its great power lies in its distance from its perceived subject matter: it makes impossible sights visible, ushers intolerably melancholy spaces into familiar abodes, reaches out across a decaying, glitching, unsustainable void and somehow pulls out something concrete, something all the more stirring for the fragility and risk of disjuncture it seems to straddle with every other note. It sounds like a lost space for lost souls; one listens and is present.
