ampanman
Title : Wood Wind Tide
Artist: Ampanman (Clive Bell + Richard Scott)
Venus Lau
The first time that Beijing knew about Clive Bell (not the art critic) was probably the year 2005, when he participated in the Sound and the City project launched in Beijing by British Council, with three other musicians including Brian Eno. Bell collected Chinese pop songs from Beijing shops and restaurants, covered them and returned his new versions of music to those shops to play – fun idea to remodel the sound of a city. But actually this Englishman is also one of the famous western performers of shakuhachi – the bamboo flute for enlightenment of Komuso – monks belong to the Japanese Buddhist Fuke Sect.
It is easy to expect the 53 minutes packed in the cute purplish paper cover to be another typical ambient laptop loops adorned with “mysterious, elusive” oriental elements. Yet surprising, every single sound in the whole album, is derived from shakuhachi performed by Clive Bell, a student of the master Kohachiro Miyata. By using microphones (like, Neumann TLM 170) musician (also another member of Ampanman, a Japanese cartoon hero whose head is made of bread) Richard Scott picked up the sound fragments from the bamboo flute, then through processors and mixers he generated new audios, which he juxtaposed or overlap on the original instrumental tunes.
The sound of shakuhachi, bears the traits of “humanity and inhumanity” at the same time, sometimes maybe a bit ascetic, monotonous. The processed sound part added textures and variousness to the instrument that “enlightens through one note”. The stratum entirely brought from this single bamboo winds is subtly beautiful, like a milky way being placed on a boulder. Yet for an instrument with a tradition that stresses the importance of spacing in the music as the sound, yes, spacing, like those in ancient Chinese paintings, the electrical re-scheming discomfits the elegant voids. Although the digital reorganizing and re-hamonizing generate possibilities for the simple-structured instrument through reallocating the sound and spacing pattern, it somewhat destroys the karesansui (Japanese zen rock gareden) style self-completeness of shakuhachi.
Some may have the comment that the album sounds like any another experimental ambient music which actually resembles soundtracks of thrillers – if Wood Wine Tides does, at least it’s the one from Ugetsu monogatari（1953）.
Artist: Ampanman (Clive Bell + Richard Scott)
Venus Lau
The first time that Beijing knew about Clive Bell (not the art critic) was probably the year 2005, when he participated in the Sound and the City project launched in Beijing by British Council, with three other musicians including Brian Eno. Bell collected Chinese pop songs from Beijing shops and restaurants, covered them and returned his new versions of music to those shops to play – fun idea to remodel the sound of a city. But actually this Englishman is also one of the famous western performers of shakuhachi – the bamboo flute for enlightenment of Komuso – monks belong to the Japanese Buddhist Fuke Sect.
It is easy to expect the 53 minutes packed in the cute purplish paper cover to be another typical ambient laptop loops adorned with “mysterious, elusive” oriental elements. Yet surprising, every single sound in the whole album, is derived from shakuhachi performed by Clive Bell, a student of the master Kohachiro Miyata. By using microphones (like, Neumann TLM 170) musician (also another member of Ampanman, a Japanese cartoon hero whose head is made of bread) Richard Scott picked up the sound fragments from the bamboo flute, then through processors and mixers he generated new audios, which he juxtaposed or overlap on the original instrumental tunes.
The sound of shakuhachi, bears the traits of “humanity and inhumanity” at the same time, sometimes maybe a bit ascetic, monotonous. The processed sound part added textures and variousness to the instrument that “enlightens through one note”. The stratum entirely brought from this single bamboo winds is subtly beautiful, like a milky way being placed on a boulder. Yet for an instrument with a tradition that stresses the importance of spacing in the music as the sound, yes, spacing, like those in ancient Chinese paintings, the electrical re-scheming discomfits the elegant voids. Although the digital reorganizing and re-hamonizing generate possibilities for the simple-structured instrument through reallocating the sound and spacing pattern, it somewhat destroys the karesansui (Japanese zen rock gareden) style self-completeness of shakuhachi.
Some may have the comment that the album sounds like any another experimental ambient music which actually resembles soundtracks of thrillers – if Wood Wine Tides does, at least it’s the one from Ugetsu monogatari（1953）.
posted by 花男 at 9:40 PM
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