Cyclic Defrost Magazine

Posted: 02 Jan 2009 09:57 PM CST

Starting to describe this album without gushing is a challenge in itself. However restraint and control is necessary to mirror the precision within Tiny Musical; if indeed this is a possible act. The constituents Akira Kosemura, {musician, graphic designer and record label manager (Schole)}, adds here are Piano, pianica (melodica), guitar, electronics programming and field recordings. Maneki Takasaka contributes acoustic and classical guitar.

Tiny Musical has a deceptively melancholy feel, in a sense, perhaps its restraint and quiet, delicate and recurring rhythmic and tonal, honed recordings, and yet a sense of heightened awareness within the crisp nature of the recording as well as the sharp prescience of piano's intonation. The tracks where piano and guitar are foregrounded outweigh the electronic sections in sheer grace and feel. Glim an almost totally electronic piece intrudes within the album and breaks the pace. Yet pieces like Shorebird have undertones, glimmer and crackle within its amorphous liquid electronic flow pleasing to the ear of long term electronic ambient enthusiast.

This controlled minimal style finds its way to our ears via the efforts of Lawrence English (Room 40), with whom Kosemura has collaborated during the Airport Symphony of the Queensland Music festival of 2007 displaying the tune Terminal. Kosemura's first album, It's on everything, appears on room 40's sister label, Something Good. Control as a sense of beauty, exuding and intoning within boundaries, not spilling out but containing sanctity within is an art form for the brave at heart. Sharing a sense of this is sheer generosity.

Innerversitysound

Jasper TX - Closet Ghosts (Fenètre Records)

Posted: 02 Jan 2009 09:58 PM CST

Dag Rosenqvist is prolific, both under the guise of Jasper TX and as part of prog-rock band De La Mancha. Closet Ghosts, his fifth album, offers a collection of compositions that are within the area of ambient guitar drone mediated by electronicia. This is a sense of reading music which is a fraught area at best and the results may very well arrive at the landscape of this album described as the farm that is laptop folk or nouveau ambient guitar based instrumental shoegaze. The signpost to the farm is not the farm itself.

To take it from the all encompassing words and to a more personal sense of music, private music if you will, conveys more of Rosenqvist. As such we can hear the melancholy, the echo of underlying optimistic brightness covered in layers of texture, not quite darkness as a cloth of static, field recordings, synths, organs.

It is not the arena of the all encompassing symbolic that joins people in groups and forms massives, but the personal expression that allows a freedom of expression, individual expression that is ironically the domain of the artist in the space of the small, private press world. It could be argued to be a massive in an ironic sense but a massive of individual voices is more of a confusion than a movement. Nowdays I only engage in movements in one room of the house and it is not the living room.

The great beauty of albums like Closet Ghosts is that they are brightly different, highly creative and opens the listener up to a brighter world amongst the melancholy. It seeks not to impose meaning but to engage the ear and the mind.

Innerversitysound