25. To be human(e)

One of my rather recent solo LPs is called "To Be Human." It was published via Apple Music et. al. in early May, and now forms the first part of a new trio of LPs, which I might as well just call the "Human Trilogy," for lack of a better idea right now (and also unofficially, so not so important). I've used the designation "Triad" once already this year, and I don't want to call it a "Triptych," since I am not David Bowie and I don't live in Berlin and Brian Eno has never produced me either, so... Okay.

I started working on this LP shortly after returning from Fukuoka for my live show in April. At that time, as mentioned in the above section about my trip, I and M-san did some video/photo shoots together both outside in the rain as well as inside of various buildings around town. One of the most interesting spaces we visited was an old, dilapidated building that was filled with (due to the rain) many leaky rooms. As we walked through the building, me taking audio/video samples with my iPhone, and he filming me as I filmed and recorded (very META!), there were crates full of water that plip-plopped constantly, the rain from outside leaking through the roof... As I love the sound of rain/water generally for sampling (you can find samples of rain on many of my songs and instrumentals) I recorded these sounds for use in some future recording, as I knew I would definitely want to use them later. These sounds made their way onto the spoken word + LOGIC beats track "To Be Human," as well as onto a number of other tracks I would later arrange both for this LP (e.g. "State of Things") as well as for its two related follow-up LPs, which I will write about below. The music video I edited for the title track includes footage that M-san took of me filming/recording inside the building, and it is rather trippy and abstract, due to the way I decided to edit it together. The mix is slightly louder on the LP.

I also spontaneously decided to film a new shorter talk back at my apartment in Tokyo around this time one evening (i.e. after returning from my Fukuoka trip), discussing Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), fragmentation/chaos (in part as a response to an interview with David Bowie c. 2002, in which he discusses this topic in some detail, including Nietzsche's proclamation that "God is dead," followed by humans believing ourselves to be "the new gods" from the start of the 20th century, creating the A-bomb, and so forth), and other such related topics. I did some "quick edits" to this short -- by my standards -- talk, inserting bits of audio/video with sound, and then later utilized pieces of the soundtracks from it, further layering and effectorizing them, and putting them to music with beats, synth bass, etc. 

So much of my recent music had been beatless, ambient/noise, and or acoustic or semi-acoustic, so adding beats and heavy bass was a conscious choice, though the tracks (the opener and closer of the LP, respectively) were anything but rock or pop. For the second of these tracks, the longer of the two, which utilized some of the same musical elements as the opener in the first half of the track, I also included samples from the original David Bowie interview, as well a short clip from an old interview with Kobo Abe (in Japanese) and a more recent interview with linguist/scholar/political commentator Noam Chomsky, discussing the terrifying possibility of a war between the U.S. and China in the 21st century, gun control in the U.S., and other related things. 

"90 Seconds (A Corrective)," my response to the sudden change from 100 to 90 seconds in the "Doomsday Clock" this year and a purely ambient instrumental track (apart from a single line of spoken word) was also included on the LP, as was my follow-up to 2021's "Is Happiness a Verb?" (which featured Sunny's uneffectorized guitar); this time around I created the track completely "solo" and reentitled the new version/sequel "Happiness Is Not a Verb," playing the acoustic in a loose, improvisatory style, atop which I do some also-improvised spoken word and vocalizations (some parts taken from the original duo version, as I remembered it in my head). During mixing, I added a drone taken from the original version of 2021's track "Hope," in order, in part, to further strengthen the connection between this track and that LP, which had included the Sunny collaborative original. Also, Ryuichi Sakamoto had died of cancer in late March (it was announced publicly early in April, which is when I, along with most people, learned of it), and the very night I had heard the sad news I composed/recorded an instrumental tribute to him using my KASTLE analogue noise synth and some improvised piano. This, too, I included on the LP in tribute to the great composer and electronic musician who had influenced me so much over the years.

On May 1, around a week before the "To Be Human" LP was officially released, and a holiday for me, I spent an entire afternoon playing with some instruments and electronic devices, or "toys," both analogue and digital, that I don't normally use much for recording in LOGIC; namely, my Kaossilator synth pad (the only time until then that I had used this device for a home recording, rather than live, was "Da'at" from earlier this year, and only at the end of the track) and the KASTLE noise synth (which I had used before a number of times, including on the aforementioned "To Be Human" LP, but I also wanted to explore more sound possibilities with it than previously). 

In addition to these two electronic devices, I had also purchased a used san-shin (三線) some months prior at the music shop where I go to have my guitar cleaned up, the Okinawan version of the Japanese three-stringed shamisen (三味線), but had only employed it twice during live improvisations (i.e. for both of my performances with the Butoh dancer, including my 50th birthday live), so this recording session also gave me an excuse to take it out and play around with it some more, recording it this time directly via LOGIC, so that I could add reverb and other effects to it later. The sessions that resulted from this day-long exploration of abstract sounds and textures (though ultimately I also ended up playing my acoustic guitar, as well as improvising a bit of vocals and spoken word, too) resulted in a freeform/experimental 35 minute-long collage/soundscape. After thinking about a title for the work, I decided on "Man & Machine," as the recordings not only included electronic elements, but also acoustic elements and voice. I also, as previously, very much had the theme of what it is to be human, and not an "A.I.," in mind, though, of course, I was also employing many "non-human/technological" devices in the recording itself, such as the Kaossilator synth pad for both beats and synthesized sounds, the KASTLE noise synth, and indeed the very recording equipment itself! (USB mic, LOGIC for mixing inside my MacBook, etc.). I therefore felt this title to be quite appropriate indeed.

As I ended up video recording the entire "sessions" at home via a stationary iPhone (and iPad, simultaenously) while I was recording the audio directly into LOGIC via the MacBook, I also some days later decided to fairly quickly edit together a "Making of..." video for my YouTube page, which can be viewed below.

The 35 minute "Man & Machine" piece, along with one song from 2016 I decided to attempt to rearrange that same day while recording "on the spot," craving a bit of pure melody and vocals in an A/B/chorus "decided" pattern (obviously it was my own original song, and also my style of arranging and performing these older songs is decidedly much looser now than it used to be) was to have been released as a short (40 minutes or so, total) LP entitled "Man & Machine." However, and though I had originally uploaded it in audio to YouTube as such, separating the one long track into shorter sections without breaks, it has now ended up as part of another release that I will discuss in a few moments, below. 

The "Man & Machine" audio-only video, with the cover art I had originally planned for it, showing me in my room recording on various instruments and "toys" (screenshots of my filming of the sessions), is here:

Although, as by now the observant reader will understand, the development of what was to follow did not happen in a linear fashion, but I will talk about the LPs in the order in which they will be released, since I now consider them to form a "linear" trilogy (the second trilogy this year, you might say, after what I had labeled the "Triad," i.e. the three LPs leading up to my 50th birthday anniversary). 

I had first created an EP I called "Humachinations" that was initially to have been a sort of remix LP for "Man & Machine," but what actually happened was a bit different... Instead, I ended up linking parts of the ambient piece that had become "To Be Human," into which I had added beats (but now with the beats removed, and somewhat remixed and rearranged), with one long unused section from the May 1 "Man & Machine" sessions. I also took the spoken word section of the track "To Be Human" which, in the original, at times is hard to hear clearly, due to the booming drums and surrounding noises, and placed it atop a more ambient, beatless backing, so that it became very clear and easy to understand what the words are (the spoken word section was completely improvised, by the bye, though there are references in it to other of my works and to/on the theme of what it is to be...human, yes!). I also added, to the final section, a spoken word section that comes from a talk I did about Ryuichi Sakamoto in Japanese shortly after his passing, which then links this track up in some ways with the tribute piece on "To Be Human," though in fact this did not occur to me until afterwards, since, again, initially this "series" was not planned as a "series" (this is not the first time I have said this about the so-called trilogies and tetralogies in my catalogue, right?!). This sprawling piece, "Humachinations," now runs for nearly 30 minutes...

At one point, I had scrapped the idea for the "Humachinations" LP completely, as I was considering incorporating sections of the longer piece into another LP (i.e. what became, and is now, the third part of the series, which I will soon come to). However, after I rethought and rearranged the third part, changing the track listing any number of times, I ultimately realized that the LP was already "full" and could not take on the longer ambient section (the part in which I had inserted my talk on Sakamoto-sensei) after adding the full version of "Man & Machine," so instead I returned to "Humachinations" in its original, full-length form and later tagged onto it two additional "outtakes" I had had and wasn't sure where I should release them. The first of these is a piano improvisation (with synth backing) called "Ayumu," and written in Japanese kanji as 歩む, which means something like "to walk," or, metaphorically-speaking, to "move forward/move ahead," and the second is calld "Search for Control," which is a palimpsestic collage of songs from the past, both recent and slightly more distant, that I had further "destroyed" and condensed for the "To Be Human" LP (it is included on the "Triad" compilation on BandCamp, but not officially released elsewhere). Once again, these links, however tenuous they might seem to some, between the tracks across the three LPs proved beneficial in terms of having the ability to consider the three LPs as a trilogy that is interlinked not only thematically and in terms of their sound/genre (i.e. dark ambient, noise, improvisational, etc.), but also in terms of their repetitions of melodic or textural or lyrical themes, all of which had become part of their very DNA.

The third part of this "triangle" is the LP that I had been working on already at the time I had first demolished the original "Humachinations" LP and was considering releasing as an unrelated release, albeit one that I felt and also understood was linked thematically in some ways with the "To Be Human" LP. This new LP, entitled "Beyond the Body," opens with a fragment from "Humachinations" featuring a portion of the spoken word section of "To Be Human," except that here it fades in with beats, and then fades out after just over three minutes' time. It serves as a brief introduction to the LP, and also provided the LP with its title (part of the improvised spoken word part included goes: "...searching for something beyond the body"); it also rather conveniently links the LP to both of the other albums. In addition to this short track, I included what was the opener of "Man & Machine," an improv for the san-shin and some improvised vocals (as well as other sounds, like me dropping a coin onto the table, etc.), in two versions: one is more-or-less without too many added effects or layers, basically just some reverb and a single overdub of san-shin at one point, and the other adds in some beat-making and other synth noises from the Kaossilator, again an unused/left-over section of "Man & Machine." These serve, after the intro (title track), as the "bookends" of the album. The LP also, of course, includes the full version of "Man & Machine," this time presented as a single track without the divisions, as well as two collaborative tracks. Let me say a word or two here about these, as they are in some ways what makes this LP stand out from the other two, apart from the "Man & Machine" solo session.

The artist who is featured on these tracks goes by the moniker "Katakamuii," the name he uses for his solo ambient project (side-project, apparently). He is a quiet young man (compared to 50 year-old me he's still young!) I met recently at an event where we had both performed. After listening to him perform solo -- his style reminded me a bit of TN's style, and yet of course he had and has his own sensibility in terms of ambient guitar and also other styles of playing the guitar -- I suggested perhaps we collaborate sometime. As he does not live within the 23 wards of Tokyo and it isn't easy for him to meet me (I myself had and am still rather busy with classes, teaching six or sometimes even seven days a week), we opted, for now, for the "remote/file sharing" method of collaboration. Actually, the sample of his guitar I used for the first of the two tracks, which I entitled, using Japanese characters, "Tomei" (透明), which means "Transparent" or "Translucent," was a recording of him I myself made when I saw him perform live at NEPO, a livehouse where I myself frequently used to perform (I filmed a video for him, later editing it and tweaking the sound in LOGIC -- this was the audio from that video I had done for him). I combined it with some other material of mine I had had, slowing it down significantly, much as I had warped older material in similar fashion for "Without Beginning or End" in the "Triad" series, and hence the track was born. The second of two was one of the files he sent me as-is (I could not separate out the sounds), originally called "575," which could very well refer to the number of syllables found in a traditional Haiku, and so I added my parts, noise and synth and so on, and renamed it "57577," which is the number of syllables found in the older, longer-form (and perhaps more "formal," too) version of Haiku called Waka.

And so, this combination of tracks, then, became the LP "Beyond the Body," and, in typical "non-linear" fashion, after completing it and even releasing it in some form via BandCamp, I later returned to "Humachinations," made the appropriate changes, and created this as a series of three dark-ambient/experimental LPs linked by sound and theme to be released in the coming weeks (update: both have now been released and are available on all major streaming services).