TOSHIYA TSUNODA / SCENERY OF DECALCOMANIA - NS3003
Unstable Contact
Wind Whistling
Cavity of Cylinder
Curved Pipe
Filmy Feedback
Ferry Passing
Cut Diagonally
listen to mp3 sample - unstable
contact
Scenery of decalcomania is the title of the album and in Tsunoda’s own words “An event causes vibrations to travel through a certain space, and the vibrations affect this space. Or to put it another way, a space is made to appear through vibration. A similar example; the stain of paint on textured paper is pressed into a new surface, a decalcomania.
Tsunoda continues to innovate and challenge in his exploration of ‘vibrating spaces'. The subtle incorporation of electronics and audio filtering, featured on three of these pieces, are an added bonus for fans of Tsunoda's work. Set against the stark beauty of his field recordings, these 'manipulations' further emphasise the unique and perceptive appreciation of acoustic phenomenon for which Tsunoda is known.
A Great Tsunoda Interview can be found here
"Decalcomania is the artisan process of transferring images or designs into china, marble or glass in such a way as to permanently fix the image to the surface. Within his latest body of magnificent environmental recordings, Toshiya Tsunoda considers this unusual and technical craft a metaphor for his own conceptions of how he stages, records, and listens to sound. As is his wont, Tsunoda explains in detail the situations for each of his recordings. Some of these are raw demonstrations of sonorous phenomena, such as the eerie whistling from a slit in a pipe whose piercing tones are the result of heavy winds passing through the corroded orifice, or the headcleaning drones from a low frequency static vibration that manifests a subtle phase pattern. Others are experiments with vibration plates and sinewaves rattling bottles and copper foil, which manifest complex tonal reflection." - The Wire - Jim Haynes
"My sole complaint about this recording is that there are seven tracks, ranging from about five to seventeen minutes instead of its being a seven-disc set, with each of the pieces allowed an hour or so to breathe. Though comprised of, more or less, naturally occurring aural phenomena, these aren’t pure field recordings in a technical sense, as Tsunoda tends to use specific and unusual set-ups to capture his sounds. So, he’ll place small microphones inside a length of U-shaped pipe, in a tiny cavity at the base of a metal cylinder or between thin sheets of copper foil, transmuting the sound vibrations that find their way into these spaces. Given that so much of the actual input is pre-existent sound, channeled through specific “funnels” but otherwise untampered with, making qualitative evaluations of the final work, as far as Tsunoda’s contribution, perhaps devolves into a simple appreciation for the choices made, both as to the means of recording and which samples (from, one would assume, an enormous library) to issue. In this regard, I think Tsunoda has curated wonderfully. There’s a wide-ranging variety of timbres, high, whistling tones to wooly, low ones, variations in spatial imagery from compressed to expansive, etc. Most of the pieces are relatively steady-state, focused on a particular phenomenon, such as wind passing from a small aperture in a metal handrail, the loose exterior billowing contrasting with but clearly relating to the tightly enclosed keening heard within the tube. Similarly, the piece involving the cylinder cavity contrasts the deep, almost liquid-sounding rushes of air through that tiny space with the chirps and tweets of area birds, unconstrained in an entirely different sonic space. The final work, “Cut Diagonally”, uses voltage gates to cut off sounds beneath certain frequency levels, leaving only the irregular “peaks” and resulting in a fascinating, difficult-to-translate welter of sonic debris that’s strongly reminiscent of some of Xenakis’ electronic explorations. The exception to this general rule, and the standout track on the disc, is “Ferry Passing”, recorded on a bridge in Kisarazu Bay, Japan, apparently with little in the way of enhancement. It unfurls like a freeform short story, narrative with no preconceived plot, leaving the listener in an anticipatory dither waiting for the next event. The harbor noises, PA announcements, scattered snatches of conversation, chimes, motors, wind and water all provide an extraordinarily rich sound field only heightened by the natural, everyday drama of small events. It’s one of the most rewarding pieces I’ve heard this year and “Scenery of Decalcomania” has been one of my most played discs in recent months, a superb recording." Bagatellan – Brian Olewnick
"After Toshiya's recent release which was in many ways different than so far, he returns to his usual territory. On 'Kapotte Muziek by Toshiya Tsunoda' he doesn't tell anything about the way he did his 'remix', which is something odd for Toshiya, because on every release he tells us about the process behind each track. 'Scenery Of Decalcomania' is no different: each of the seven tracks is described at length here. Everything is Tsunoda's work has to do with the spatial quality of sound, where to put a microphone (usually a tube or cylinder) in relation to the sounds that he wants to record, say a ferry passing or the wind on a bridge. Maybe you think: ah the usual Tsunoda work, but there are some interesting chances in his work. There are seven tracks on this CD, much less than on some of his previous work. Also it seems to me that there is some more electronic sound, such as in 'Cut Diagonally' and in 'Unstable Contact' - in which he returns to using vibrating plates. In some of the other pieces he deals with more pure field recordings, which makes this into a much more varied CD than some of his previous works. It works really well, this variation and this is a very good introduction to the work of Tsunoda, who is not just a fine composer of field recording works, but also constructs wonderfull sound installations." - Vital Weekly Frans De Ward
"Tsunoda is that kind of sound artist able to discover lyricism in inanimate materials; this album contains seven recordings made at different times and places, where microphone positioning and vibration (natural or induced) are the basis for peculiar aural phenomena. While the wind through a tube or a gas cylinder at work create ever changing spurious frequencies behaving like out-of-focus environmental snapshots around the listener, an oscillator moving copper foils translates into penetrating refractions of metallic light going from a room corner to another, also depending on head movement. The most fascinating piece is "Ferry passing": an illustration of a bay from a bridge where the totality of sound sources is bathed in natural reverberation to form a separate world where objects and souls reach an unembodied fusion, existing on their own and as an organic whole at the same time." - Touching Extremes – Massimo Ricci
"The third album on Naturestrip is Scenery of Decalcomania, the most successful Toshiya Tsunoda outing I've come across since Pieces Of Air on Lucky Kitchen. As ever with Tsunoda's work you can choose to ignore the accompanying explanatory paragraphs and try to work out what's going on yourself, or read his rather sniffy pedagogical notes before or during the listening experience. Both approaches seem to work quite well. This particular outing is a little less arid than his recent Sirr release O respirar da paisagem, but still has its peaks and troughs. The recordings made on a footbridge in Kisarazu Bay, with passing hooting ferries and whistling wind are spectacular, and there's a certain sparking white laboratory beauty to the opening "Unstable Contact", whose use of bottles and sine waves recalls Alvin Lucier's work with mics in enclosed spaces, but the final "Cut Diagonally", a kind of quasi-Xenakis gated remix of Tsunoda's own "bottle at mountain road" (from extract field recording archive #2 on Häpna) overstays its welcome somewhat. Still, these are minor quibbles - each of these elegantly packaged and beautifully produced discs merits your time and attention." Paris Transatlantic - Dan Warbuton
"Melbourne’s latest purveyor of high quality sound experimentation is Naturestrip whose newest recording is the latest from Toshiya Tsunoda (Korm Plastics, SIRR). As Scenery of Decalcomania opens with the microgrinding on “Unstable Contact” one wonders if this is a cautionary tale, or if this will prep babies for future visits to their local DMD. A reoccurring, spinning, sandpaper to a blackboard drill works away at your rational patience, until taken over by a levitating orb fueled only by light. Tsunoda plays with the sound you can feel in your nerve endings and then surprises you by adding the fervor of the natural environment (“Wind Whistling”). His sound is geometric, full-bodied and in it he contains bird calls, the ocean and other natural phenomena that balance the equal purity of man’s machines in action. We participate in his sphere of sound in the boldly impenetrable “Cavity of Cylinder.” The sharp buzzing of “Filmy Feedback” is kind of intoxicating depending on where you turn your head as you listen. The sound is fleeting as you move, as it pulses with a neon brightness. It’s extreme music for sure. Nothing subtle about this torrent of psychic minimalism." Igloomag - TJ Norris
"Melbourne based label Naturestrip have been issuing some interesting releases in their short time of activity. This disc, the latest from Japanese primary art teacher and renowned sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda is arguably one of his most playful releases. The sounds here are as usual uncharacteristic of their sources. We find works like 'Wind Whilsting', take on a sound that seems far more synthetic than the process of wind passing over and through surfaces. Toshiya likes to remind us that there¹s a sound world out there that we choose to ignore, one that is full of rich subtly and understated intensity. 'Curved Pipe' is a fine example of his, the transformation of naturally occurring sound within this small space creating an ominous drone that¹s rich in so many ways. Like other Japanese sound artists including Akio Suzuki, there¹s a sense of magic to Toshiya¹s work." Time Off - Lawrence English
"Recent visitor to our shores Japanese field recordist Toshiya Tsunoda is renowned for his desire to record the minute vibrations of sound, having previously recorded the likes of motion of air within a glass bottle. On Scenery of Decalcomania Tsunoda suggests that “an event causes vibrations through a certain space, and the vibrations affect this space.” Tsunoda’s interest is in documenting this altered space and in order to do this he sets up a few little experiments for himself and then enthusiastically records the results. Thus armed with three glass bottles, three vibration plates and sine waves he creates a miniature symphonic hum that is gradually overcome by the pitches of the pure sine waves on the opener Unstable Contact. Then there’s Wind Whistling, where he records the sound of the wind whistling through a narrow slit in the handrail of a footbridge, the pitch changing according to the strength of the wind, sounding like a gentler higher pitched companion to Alan Lamb’s infamous wind on powerlines experiments. Elsewhere he records a narrow cavity under a cylinder resulting in a watery drone replete with nearby bird calls, the sound of a nearby ferry, the almost calming drones recorded from the opening of a pipe, plus other more complex experiments involving oscillators and sine waves. Tsunoda strength is his desire to focus on the microsim of tiny sounds often overlooked or impossible to hear with the human ear. His recordings are less about static representations of environments than on how the impact of an outside force irrevocably changes a space." Cyclic Defrost - Bob Baker Fish
"The entire genre
of “environmental” recordings could not have come into
being without recording subjects interjecting themselves into an existing
soundscape in some manner. Some recording techniques are specifically
designed to efface (or attempt to erase) the subject’s role
in their creation (e.g. leaving an unattended microphone to record).
Others combine “natural” field recordings with studio
post-processing to alter the original acoustics. Whether presented
“naturally” or post-processed, the original sound source
is privileged as “authentic.” But what happens when the
acoustic sources for the sounds that are recorded in situ are deliberately
introduced during the recording process itself? Can this still be
said to be an “environmental” recording?
According to sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda, the answer is “yes”,
but it all depends on your definition of environment. Proceeding from
the prima facie (but unstated) premise that an observed location must
include an observer, in the back cover notes to “Scenery of
Decalcomania” Tsunoda defines “environment” as a
combination of a place and its observer while the subjective perception
of that place that does not include the observer is “scenery.”
By this definition, there is no way for a place to have been recorded
except through its transformation to environment, and scenery exists
only as an egocentric delusion, a false exteriority (except of course
for the listener who only experiences the environment through the
recording medium).
For Tsunoda, locating the original source of sounds in an environment
is not as exciting (or important) as exploring how those sounds interact
with each other and the space in which they exist. In other words,
there is no original “decal” or “canvas” only
the results of their contact. In this way, he re-imagines decalcomania
as an acoustic process, with sounds “leaving marks” on
each other. “Scenery…” consists of seven different
instances of this principle.
“unstable contact” begins the disc with a recording made
of three bottles and vibration plates placed in varied positions with
respect to the bottles. The initial base note of the recording is
a beautifully rounded tone (presumably a resonance of one or more
of the bottles). On top of this, irregularly modulating scrapes, chirps
and whistles are caused by intermittent contact of metal vibration
plates with the bottles. The independent motion of the sounds in relation
to each other unfolds as an acoustic microdrama. Pure high frequency
sine waves emerge from the complexity to give the impression of levitation
among the bottles (this effect is especially pronounced when listening
with headphones).“wind whistling” is a much lower key
affair capturing the wind off of Kisarazu Bay as it weaves its way
through bridge railings. Against the constant backdrop of the ocean
and turbulent noise, the railings vibrations sing in a spectral chorus
as Tsunoda accentuates their contributions by volume editing. “cavity
of a cylinder” is recorded inside a gas cylinder and features
a low rolling drone and its resonance in the cylinder which does sound
as though something is in restless contact with the cylinder’s
walls. This interaction is accented occasionally by nearby bird calls
which manage to seem alien so completely has the acoustic structure
of the cylindrical container been internalized by the listener.“curved
pipe” uses a slightly different methodology in that it consists
of a transmission of sound into a U-shaped pipe recorded by two microphones
inside the pipe. The pristinely seductive vibration inside the pipe
is drawn off-center by a continual but slow phase shift in what I
think might be the most beautiful recording on the disc. “filmy
feedback” is also a different sort of beast than the first three
entries because the vibrations captured were instigated by Tsunoda.
This time, he plays a sine wave of a frequency above the audible range
of the human ear (and the CD, and most playback mechanisms, etc.)
through two vibration plates. These resonate between the plates and
two foil sheets on subharmonics (though still pretty high frequency
– ask my dog about that). The phases move in oscillations from
gentle lopes to so fast that they dissolve into tones and unpredictable
ephemeral effects that give this piece a squelchy, lurching quality
at times.Rather than the claustrophobic effects of surfaces in close
contact with each other, “ferry passing” chronicles the
voyage of a ferry under a bridge (coincidentally the same bridge as
in “wind whistling”) and its lingering acoustic effects.
Rather than seeming lonely and barren, the location teems with life
initially as the bridge and sea form a cavern and the ferry performs
the duty of sound source. The Doppler effect of the ship’s entrance
to the cavern gradually dissipates to a low hum punctuated by the
sounds of construction and navigation (from harsh pneumatic hammers
to some lovely echoic bells near the end). This piece is the closest
Tsunoda comes to narrative. For all of its similarities to its neighbors
in terms of tracing sonic interactions, the overall effect of the
“wider angle focus” in creating a depth of field is quite
striking. The peaceful lull established in “ferry passing”
is shattered by the grainy and glitchy attack of the final piece “cut
diagonally.” By gating a mix of a sine wave and source material
from an earlier “bottle” recording with a “high
pass” volume filter, Tsunoda manages to emulate everything from
an airplane approaching the runway to the scream, grate and whine
of a saw cutting through wood. It’s the one piece on the disc
where Tsunoda’s own actions once the recording begins are most
noticeable. It is as if by the final track he is willing not only
to acknowledge his presence but also his active participation in the
proceedings.
Tsunoda’s recasting of decalcomania as an acoustic phenomenon
is not the only invocation of that process on “Scenery…”
In reading between the lines of Tsunoda’s notes, and through
the listener’s own experience of the pieces as “sceneries”,
decalcomania becomes a metaphor for how a perceiving subject’s
own extant imagining of a place is superimposed upon that place during
perception. Here the “decal” to be transferred is the
person’s preconceived notions of the place, the other “canvas”
is the place itself and the resulting perception is the combination
of the two. Tsunoda’s exhortation to his listeners is to free
themselves from the constraints of their prejudicial ordering and
classification of stimuli, recognize this combination as an integrated
whole, and in so doing become (re)awakened to the possibilities of
sound. -
Foxy Digitalis - Brad Rose
* Decalcomania is the artistic process (originated by the surrealist
Oscar Dominguez) where an image is transferred from one surface to
another through contact. It can be used to uncover complex visual
relationships (e.g. fractals emerginSg from superimposed forms), or
to create refrigerator art in nursery school “studios”
(e.g. inking one side of a folded piece of paper then closing the
paper on itself).- Steve Rybicki -
