KOZO INADA & FRANS DE WAARD - UNTITLED

Cassette, https://temporarymountain.bandcamp.com/

The New York-based label temporary mountain is reasonable obscure, as I, with my 30 years in experimental music, hadn't heard of them before. And that's quite surprising to me because this release fits my taste like a glove! Yes, I'll start with how I'm usually ending. This is a great cassette / digital thingy one must have in one's collection.

Japanese sound artist Kozo Inada fills the first side. A name I hadn't heard of before but my oh my... He has two pieces entitled "n[0]" and "n[1]". The rest of his discography means these two titles should be considered a full release in contradiction of being some work made for a sampler or something. The pieces are well thought of and both very different yet alike. "n[0]" contains beautifully layered ambience and field recordings and has an overall surrealistic sound. Is that applause, or is it a combination of rain and wind? The minimalistic approach to dynamics really makes the different parts of this track come alive. The second track by Inada is likely about the placement of structures in a structureless environment. Repetitive manipulations of layers in a sound composition. So: Why the difficult choice of words? Well, it's not music for easy listening, even though the result is very open and accessible. You can hear Kozo really tried to make something beautiful here, and it worked. A mesmerizing piece, taking you places you never thought of visiting. Time to dive into the discography of this hidden gem.

And then the reverse side, a single 20-minute piece by Frans de Waard. Lots of times, you can listen to a track and being a musician, you can analyze a bit how things are done - maybe professional deformation? But more often, with Frans' work, I cannot do so, which makes his work intriguing. The track is called "~*|0|*~", which doesn't reveal anything, but it's a collection of experiments within the same setting as Kozo. Some heavy use of delays but with different sonic input resulting in a zoviet:france feel at moments and then suddenly more towards something that can be found on the Touch label and then a vibe that would fit a pre-1990 Staalplaat album. The experiments with rhythms in the second part of the track aren't truly rhythmic in nature, but more, well, again zoviet:France comes to mind but now more the 'Digilogue'-era. Rhythms that are part of a drone, or maybe that are becoming a drone. Impressive or, as we say in the Netherlands: "Sterk spul".

This collaboration has been a thing that had to happen. Frans being a 'fan' of Kozo's work, really wanted to work with him after he (Kozo, not Frans) stopped producing music the normal way and focussed more on installations. That was 2007. They both worked and reworked each others sounds and talked about the content. So they both had sounds to be inspired from and directions in which to think. You would think there would be some recognizable parts here and there, but the result is completely different.