Asuna :: Tide Ripples
Asuna spent ten years building Tide Ripples from a single guitar figure. Inside it is Rima Kato's voice — a singer who walked away from music in 2001, gave five years to football instead, and was only pulled back by a stranger's blog post about a band she'd already forgotten.
Naoyuki Arashi, the Japanese composer who records as Asuna, built his reputation on immodest music: pieces like "100 Keyboards" work by accumulation, more sound piled onto more sound until the structure threatens to buckle under its own density.
Tide Ripples (Home Normal, 2016) is the record where that habit finally goes quiet. Its two pieces, "Her Fringe, Ferris Wheel, Ruins of Twisted Yarn" and "Midnight Snow, Street Lights, Window of Empty Building," each run past twenty minutes and were composed and recorded across a decade, between 2006 and 2016.
The first piece opens on a guitar figure that Arashi lets repeat with almost stubborn insistence, joined eventually by a distant accordion and a slow accrual of grayish, half-submerged tones, the sound seeming to thicken the air around it rather than fill it. The second commits even further to restraint: for its first ten minutes it barely leaves a single guitar phrase, circling it until the repetition itself turns hypnotic, closer to a minimalist reading of British acid folk than to ambient drone, before the guitar recedes and lets a warm, pulsing hum take the foreground on its own. Structurally it has something of Jim O'Rourke's Bad Timing about it, another record built from a guitar figure stretched taut over the better part of an hour, until the stretching itself becomes the subject.
What keeps Tide Ripples from settling into pure technique is Rima Kato, whose vocals, chorus and humming move through both pieces less as performance than as texture, one more element the tape happened to catch on its way past. She sings almost nothing you could transcribe, no verses, no chorus in the ordinary sense, only breath shaped into pitch. On its own that might just read as drone logic extended to the human voice. Knowing her history, though, it sounds like something closer to a return.
She had stopped singing once already. Her teenage band Strrows, an unruly lo-fi outfit as indebted to Shonen Knife as to the Kinks, broke up in 2001, and for the five years that followed she gave her attention to football rather than to music, without any apparent regret. What brought her back was almost embarrassingly small: sometime around 2007, having finally bought herself a computer, she searched her own name and found a blog post remembering a band that even its own singer had mostly stopped thinking about, written, as it turned out, by Asuna himself, who ran a tiny label called aotoao. The mini-album that followed in 2012, and the records that came after it, trace their way back to that one unlikely paragraph.
Knowing this changes how Tide Ripples sits in the ear afterward. The ambient tranquillity is still there, but underneath it now you can hear something else: the sound of somebody being coaxed back into a room she had already left once.
