Michael Pisaro / Greg Stuart - Closed Categories in Cartesian Worlds (GW 010)
Michael Pisaro / Greg Stuart - Closed Categories in Cartesian Worlds (GW 010) was just released today. The details are here:
Graham Lambkin / Jason Lescalleet 「Photographs」 (Erstwhile 070-2)
グレアム・ラムキンとジェイソン・レスカリートは、エッジのある大胆な音作りとアナログサウンドの温かみを絶妙のバランスで融合させたコラボ作品を、2006年頃から作り続けている。２枚組の本作は、過去にアーストワイルから出た2008年の「The Breadwinner」と2010年の「Air Supply」に続く第３弾完結編。
今回の作品では、ラムキンとレスカリートの出生地や子供時代に親しんでいた場所、悟りの瞬間が訪れた場所、絶望に打ちのめされた場所など、各々の人生における重大な転機を物語る音を随所に挿入し、家族や友人に囲まれる時間、時と共に変わりゆく街の音、静止したまま消えていく過去のシーンなどが走馬灯のように立ち現れる中、アルバムの写真をめくるように、２人の歴史の中へと聴き手を招き入れる。録音は、ラムキンの出生地である英国のフォークストンと、レスカリートの出生地である米国マサチューセッツ州ウースターで行われた。単にノスタルジックに過去を振り返るだけの作品ではなく、現在のラムキンとレスカリートという２人のアーティストの複雑でユニークな個性を鋭く多角的に表現した意欲作でもある。
本作では、２人のコラボ作第３弾完結編を記念し、UV加工を施した12枚パネルの豪華仕様デジパックの中に、２人の人生における重要な場所で撮られた過去の写真数枚が、アルバム写真のように収められている。
http://www.erstwhilerecords.com/catalog/070.html
左から「The Breadwinner」「Air Supply」「Photographs」（Erstwhile Records）
「The Breadwinner」「Air Supply」「Photographs」の三部作に収められたCD4枚。
Cover Design of Michael Pisaro - Closed Categories in Cartesian Worlds (GW 010)
Michael Pisaro / Greg Stuart - Closed Categories in Cartesian Worlds (GW 010)
To be released in early November.
My Father's Design Tutorial Book (1966)
This is my dad's design tutorial book which was issued in Japan in 1966, titled 'Commercial Design: How to Create Store Design and Layout'.
I found this last issue at an online used book store and got it, since the one my dad used to have was unfortunately discarded by my family when he passed away seven years ago. The book was just delivered to my old home in Japan, one week before the seventh anniversary of my dad's death, and in the middle of the Bon holiday ('Bon' is a Japanese Buddhist custom to honor the spirits of one's ancestors).
I saw this design book when I was a little kid, but have never read it seriously since then, so I am really looking forward to seeing it. I had never learned anything about design from my dad when he was alive, but I feel that his influence is always here to help me in doing design.
私の父（座間敏生）が1966年に出した商業デザインの本『コマーシャルデザイン 商店図案の考え方・作り方』の最後の中古の１冊を、ネットの古本屋で見つけたので購入した。父が持っていた本はすべて、他界した後に破棄されてしまったので、古本屋で入手できて本当に良かった。今日ちょうどお盆の最中、父が他界して７年目の命日の１週間前に実家に届いた。父も喜んでいるだろう。
Homemade Gluten-Free Orange Almond Cake
Homemade gluten-free orange almond cake, topped with unsweetened whipped cream. This is a perfect summer dessert to have with afternoon tea (my favorite is Earl Grey tea).
The amount of sugar for the cake sponge is less than half of the most similar American recipes, but it has just the right touch of sweetness. I used 1 tsp of orange oil instead of grated zest of 3 oranges, and poured 2 tablespoons of the mixture of freshly squeezed orange juice, lemon juice and sugar on top after taking the cake out of the oven. I also added 1 tsp of vanilla extract in the sponge batter (which was not written in the original recipe). Even though this cake contains no butter or oil, the cake is surprisingly soft and moist and flavorful.
The bright yellow color of the cake simply came from the organic eggs from Murray's (on Bleecker Street, NYC). I tried eggs from various places in NYC (including some famous organic farms at Union Square Greenmarket), but the ones from Murray's are the best both in taste, quality and freshness.
Recipe was adapted from Susannah Blake's book 'Afternoon Tea'.
MODIFIED RECIPE (8-inch cake)
Ingredients for the cake is: 3 large eggs, 1+1/4 cup (110 g) ground almonds, 1/2 cup (130 g) granulated sugar, 1 tsp vanilla extract, 1 tsp orange oil (or grated zest of 3 unwaxed oranges).
Ingredients for orange syrup is: 1/2 freshly squeezed orange juice, 1 tsp lemon juice, 2 tsp granulated sugar.
Baked at 350F for 25 minute (5 minutes longer than the original recipe).
Another (and crucial) modification I added was to wrap the warm cake in a plastic wrap soon after taking it out of the oven, instead of cooling the cake completely on the wire rack like most American cake recipes suggest. Cooling it on the wire rack will make the cake too dry, so it is important to keep it moist by covering the warm cake in Saran wrap or cake pan until it cools down completely. (This is a common technique used in Japanese cake recipes to keep it moist.) Then wrap the cake in double Saran wraps and rest it in a fridge for several hours to overnight to bring out the best taste. The leftover cake can be stored in the freezer for 3 months, individually double wrapped and put in a freezer (in a Zip Lock bag).
Antoine Beuger / Michael Pisaro 'this place / is love (erst 068)' is released
Antoine Beuger / Michael Pisaro - this place / is love (erst 068) was officially released today. Very happy with the final product, especially how the disc image turned out. One of my favorite CD covers and disc labels I have ever designed. (And the music is fantastic!)
You can see a bigger picture here.
Afternoon Tea on Our Deck
MENU FOR AFTERNOON TEA (6/15/2013)〜アフタヌーンティー at 自宅テラス
Mini Cheese Corn Muffins
Tomato & Cucumber Sandwich on Whole Wheat Bread
Chocolate Cake
Mini Chocolate Mousse Cup
Strawberries
Earl Grey Tea
(all homemade except strawberries, served on Royal Albert china)
Afternoon Tea at Home
MENU FOR AFTERNOON TEA (Thursday June 6, 2013) 〜アフタヌーンティー at Home メニュー
Buttermilk Scones Served with: clotted cream, strawberry jam, homemade lemon curd, whipped cream
Finger Sandwiches on Homemade Whole Wheat Bread (Curried Chicken & Watercress, Smoked Turkey Breast & Cucumber, Tomato, Mozzarella, Basil)
Mini Quiches (w/ bacon, onion, gruyere, parmesan)
Mini Cheddar Corn Muffins
Chocolate Cream Tartlets
Strawberry Tartlets
Mini Chocolate Cup Mousse
Mini Eclairs
Macarons (choice of macarons)- Rose Macarons, Coffee Macarons, Green Tea Macarons
Earl Grey tea (served with lemon slices, milk & sugar)
(All homemade, served on Royal Albert china)
Independent Art Fair 2013 (3/9 in Chelsea, NYC)
Above photo is Michel François' copper tubing work and Richard Aldrich's painting at Bortolami gallery booth, from Independent Art Fair 2013. Michel François was the most fascinating artist whom I found at the art show this year.
You can see more of his works here:
My other photos from Independent Art Fair 2013 is here:
The art show was held at the former Dia Art Foundation building, which used to be my most favorite gallery space in NYC.
Antoine Beuger's Music
Dissolve the borders between the outer world and the inner world with the equality of sound, silence, performer, environment and listener
In order to understand and appreciate Antoine Beuger’s compositions, I strongly recommend you to experience live concerts if possible. One memorable one for me was in 2010, when Ben Owen and Barry Chabala played Beuger’s un lieu pour être deux, and Dominic Lash played calme étendue in a small room of a church in the East Village of Manhattan. I would like to quote a part of my review I wrote afterwards, since it seems to connect with how Beuger’s compositions in general make me feel.
“At most concerts, the musicians and their performed sounds command most of the audience’s attention, but here it felt more like the performers and the environment were existing equally, sharing the same space and time, creating harmonious music as a collective entity of chance events. There was also less of a sense of boundary between the performers and the audience, as if the stillness of the audience were a part of the music, too, and the distance normally existing between the active performers and the passive audience in most live concerts felt much smaller.
The silence of the performer and his instrument seemed to be the core of the space in this piece. They were like a center which united all the environmental sounds heard in the room with transparent threads to the invisible music, so the rustle of trees, cars passing by, chirps of birds, and stomping noises of people upstairs started to feel like parts of the music which was developing silently. Despite there being no actual performed sounds at this point, there was a tight sense of unity over the whole situation – the performer and the instrument which remained still, the environmental sounds randomly coming from outside, the silent audience listening to the whole situation carefully – with all of them sharing the same time and space.
Dominic Lash’s silence did not cause a cooped-up feeling to reject the environmental sounds at all. Instead, it had an openness to accept all the other noises heard in the room, like breathing the air. The naturalness of his silence made me feel that the performer and the audience equally exist here, just like the wind and trees, rivers and oceans equally exist on earth.” (August 12, 2010)
Antoine Beuger’s compositions seem to welcome any possibility. It is not just music that is created by the sounds of the instruments performed from the score, but also music that accepts all the accidental sounds (and noises) happening in a situation equally. If it is performed in an extremely silent room where the environmental noises are hardly heard, or if it is performed in a room where various environmental noises are jumping in, or if the volumes and the natures of outside noises are different, the same composition may give the audience completely different impressions. By accepting these various elements of eventuality, Beuger seems to show that one single composition could contain infinite possibilities in the ways of experiencing the music.
The equality seems to be the key to Beuger’s music – where all the elements including the performers’ sounds, the silences, the environmental sounds, and the audience are all considered as parts of the music. The silence is as important as the sound, the environmental sounds are as important as the performers’ sounds, and the audience is as important as the performer. These elements, normally recognized as opposite subjects facing or confronting with each other (i.e. sound vs. silence, performer vs. audience) in conventional music, seem to become parallel in Beuger’s pieces to move closely together along the time. This unique signature of Beuger’s pieces can be seen in the following two CDs.
Antoine Beuger’s 2010 release keine fernen mehr is a double CD that consists solely of the sounds of whistling. In this piece, Beuger himself whistles in an extremely quiet manner to give the sounds a very fragile, fleeting, flaky texture. Between the individual whistles, there are almost inaudible faint sounds of Beuger’s breath and the room noises at a quiet white noise level. Rather than sounding like a particular pitched sound, Beuger’s whistle contains several different nuances of tones at the same time. The ambiguity of the tone of his whistles makes me feel as if I were listening to the sounds of the wind rather than human sounds. The translucency of Beuger’s whistling, that give the impression of blowing through the gray area between sound and silence, overlap with the white noise of the environmental sounds (both on the CD and in my room) and dissolve the border between the performed sounds and the environmental sounds – as well as the border between sound and silence. And at the same time, the personal nature of the whistling sounds appeals to the listener’s sense directly as if he/she was hearing the sound of his/her own mind, leading him/her to descend down to a deep, calm contemplation, and dissolves the border between the outer world (performed sounds and environmental sounds) and the listener’s inner world (contemplation).
This borderless sense (or equal sense) of the outer world and the inner world is also experienced in Beuger’s 1997 composition calme étendue (spinoza). In this piece, the performer is instructed to read the text of Spinoza’s Ethics very attentively and carefully in a very relaxed tempo (one word in every eight seconds), with a very quiet voice. The performer should not try and suggest a specific meaning to the individual words or groups of words, through emphasis or intonation. Spoken sections alternate with sections of silence. In these silent sections, the performer is instructed to sit quietly, doing nothing, with calm concentration. On the CD released from Edition Wandelweiser in 2001, Beuger himself read the text from Ethics.
With this monotonic manner of reading in between complete silences, Spinoza’s words start to be heard in a very interesting way. The genuine phonetic individuality that is inherent within each word (color, brightness, texture, darkness, softness, solidness, thickness, etc.) starts to emerge without being attached to its meaning. Each word contains a slightly different tone from others, creating a slightly different shape of ripple in the silence after, which makes each silence feel differently nuanced. Just like each person has a different individuality, each word contains a different inner world. In this piece, under these extreme sparse circumstances where each word is presented in its simplest form, the world inherent in each word feels as if it has been enlarged and projected into the following silence. Here, the sounds and the silences have an equal impact over the listener. The immanence of each word projected in the silence after, which contains a slightly different tone and impression, echoes the listener’s inner world to combine to truly compose the music. This makes the whole listening experience of this piece feel intensely personal despite the sparseness and the monotone of the sounds, letting the listener experience something similar to a deep contemplation specific to themselves.
Antoine Beuger composes his music with visible tones and invisible tones, opening a path to connect the outer world (performed sounds and the silences) with the listener’s inner world to make a more unified form of music.
