8 Tracks: To Drift To With Joshua Sabin

I love Christina Kubisch’s ideas and by chance was in Berlin summer 2014 so caught her ‘Hidden From View’ solo show at Galerie Mazzoli. Kubisch’s work chimes with me, she sheds light on an otherwise inaudible but sonically rich electromagnetic landscape. I can’t remember where I read it, but she’s discussed how over the course of a decade, she has witnessed these hidden sounds change drastically – their initial clarity now swept up in a dense noise of new emitters, new technologies, and new telecommunications. Our perception of the evolution of our cities is so grounded in the physical or tangible, so to observe this transformation from within a hidden sonic world is something very cool.

Ancient court music from Japan – purely from a compositional perspective the ideas in this feel so modern and are a strong influence for me. Over 1000-years old, crazy beautiful, texturally and temporally fascinating.

One of the 4 scenes from ‘STIGMA’. I saw this at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo – not the best staging (noisy as shit outside the room) – but definitely a powerful experience. Kirkegaard recorded this piece around Fukushima and so continuing the thread from his Chernobyl based work. His exploratory and environment oriented approach is obviously something I’m on-board with.

Artist/sculptor born 1924 in my hometown Leith, Edinburgh. Since I was a kid I’ve been influenced by the aesthetics of and ideas within his work – particularly the sculptures where he brought together the human body with technology and machines. A lot of it is pretty playful, but the work around this concept provoked a deep reaction and many questions in me. Ideas pertinent today and with me still.

Takemitsu’s music is always so timbrally rich – ‘I Hear the Water Dreaming’, ‘Rain Tree’, ‘Toward the Sea’, are some of my favourites but ‘Ceremonial An Autumn Ode’, bookended with sections played solo on the Sh?, is beautifully weighted and paced throughout.

I always come back to this track, generous at 12-minutes, plus the whole album is flawless.

This is just a super fun record, produced by the godfather Haruomi Hosono and released in 1984. I can’t stomach the classical and French interpretations she came out with later, but this is a belter.

Born in Gifu, Japan, but now based and working in Paris, sound artist Ryoji Ikeda is known for his sound works, installations, and experimental/ambient music – the latter is what initially peaked my interest. His album ‘1000 Fragments’ is awesome, particularly ‘Luxus’ and ‘5 Zones’, but I really love ‘dataplex’ which includes ‘data.matrix’ as linked here. Surgical production and he uses the extremes of our audible spectrum to visceral effect.