*[music] Toshiya Tsunoda / Manfred Werder 'detour

Since Toshiya Tsunoda / Manfred Werder 'detour' was released last year, several people asked us about the concept and details of the collaboration, so I posted some text I wrote based on what Toshiya and Manfred told me about the piece. 

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On 'detour', Toshiya Tsunoda did all the recording himself (except for 10 minutes of the temple recording part, which was done by Manfred), but it was done by Tsunoda keeping Manfred's involvement deeply in mind, along with Werder's concept and score, and using Werder's method. 

They exchanged many long, involved e-mails before meeting in person, discussing concepts and how their perspectives overlapped and didn't overlap. They spent some time together in Tokyo in the spring of 2014, prior to production, to further develop the concept and the method of recording by making some test recordings together in Tokyo. This earlier stage of collaboration helped to structure the actual recordings later on. So Werder's contribution to the piece was crucial, even though he was not so much involved in the actual recordings.

Werder also told us: "The reason why I particularly like this collaborative piece with Toshiya is that it was able to avoid the conventional risk that many collaborative works tend to fall into - something like a patchwork of two or more musicians' material. Our collaboration certainly exists in the layers of the recordings, as well as in the realms of imagination and reality that might be evoked by those layers.

There are some parts of 'detour' (near the end) that sound like processed sounds, but they are all nature sounds, and Tsunoda did not add any processing to this work. He placed a stethoscope on the floor, which picked up unexpected sounds (like insect chirps) that are inaudible to the human ear, which may sound like electronics in the piece (but there are no actual electronics in 'detour').