Browse by Artist: MINAMO

Artist:	MINAMO
Title:	Shining
Label:	12K
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	12K 1031CD

"Japan's Minamo. Shining is the quartet's 5th full-length release to date and continues in a common tradition of being sourced and edited from live performance recordings, a practice central to the band's interest in improvisational forms and organic track growth. While guitar is still the prominent instrument, Shining takes a slightly different path from the drone-oriented releases of the past. Still pursuing vague and evasive atmospheres Minamo now inject much more prominent rhythm and turbulence, as on 'Crumbling's' software driven looping or 'Stay Still's' 16th note picked guitar repetition that is quietly offset by sparse piano. This is part of what makes Shining a work of subtle pairings and contrasts. Digital hums and crackles merge with the glacial pace of peaceful, melodic string resonance, blurred echoes of familiar sounds fall away into pools of feedback. This is highly free-formed work yet at the same time there is an obvious communication between musicians (and instruments) that makes Minamo's music a language unique to a 4-piece band as they continue to explore the unstable boundaries of free improv, post-rock, and live electronic ambience."

Artist:	MINAMO
Title:	Durée
Label:	12K
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	12K 1058CD

"Back in 1999, on the forefront of the Japanese electronic/acoustic microsound scene, was the then two-piece live improvisation band Minamo (two more members were added in 2001 to make the current four-piece lineup). Their live concerts helped pioneer this hybrid of delicate and natural instrumentation with microscopic electronics and subtle digital processing bringing an organic richness to a genre that threatened to remain coldly digital. Fans of Minamo not lucky enough to see them create their music live have enjoyed their studio albums and collaborative releases which captured these performances and processed them into hypnotic drones and electro-acoustic soundscapes. Durée, their last studio work since 2007's collaboration with Tape, and their follow-up to Shining on 12k (12k1031, now out of print), takes influence from the French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson's concept of 'pure durée,' an idea that one's consciousness is a constant flow and not something that can be divided, reversed, or measured. Minamo used these ideas in creating their music, despite the contradiction of the time-stamped CD format, to try to subvert the ideas of compartmentalized 'time' and 'space.' With a strong sense of non-linearity and flow taken from Bergson's ideas, Minamo have created a colorful, skittering wash of music, noise, and texture that embraces a sense of out-there-ness. Minamo are Yuichiro Iwashita (acoustic guitar, percussion), Namiko Sasamoto (keyboards, saxophone, percussion), Keiichi Sugimoto (electric guitar, computer, nintendo, bells, recording/mixing) and Tetsuro Yasunaga (percussion, harmonium, analog synthesizer, pedals, small instruments). Like all of their music, Durée was recording during long, live, improvisational sessions and later finessed and mixed in the studio for release. Their process this time around, however, was much more analog than before. While they have always incorporated guitars, computers and synthesizers into their work, Durée captured performances created with an abundance of acoustic and percussion instruments and analog synths, keeping digital effects to a minimum and preferring the dirty sound of guitar pedals. The process this time around came easier due to the natural musical communication built between the members over the past 10 years. Durée simply finds more playing and interaction than editing and programming as compared to previous releases and, according to Sugimoto, is finally the mark where Minamo wants to be, and a template for work to come."

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