CD – Baskaru
This is the third and final episode of the Hypernatural series, which is inspired by research into Far Eastern organic sounds. It is distinguished by sensitive audio “transparencies”, obtained through the interweaving of recordings, which are often ethereal and abstract. Yoshio Machida is incredibly skilled in combining and manipulating these auditory “evanescences”, adding a wider harmonic audio “substance”. Applying this approach to quiet, but nevertheless highly evocative transitions requires an accomplished technique. It is a composing process that has been improved over the last ten years, beginning with DIY production and continuing its evolution with the German label Softlmusic in 2002. The atmospheric resonances are touching, as ephemeral interruptions, with notes rising intimately and singularly, until a complex and continuous flow of iterations and rhythmic upheavals is built, with an effective orchestration in a global glitch. They are fragments of a gentle and hesitant poetic, but not really an insipid one. Machida states: “Oblivion is the characteristic of the correlation between matter and time. Oblivion has a positive aspect. It appears as a natural phenomenon, in the passage of time, and becomes a factor that makes a new world- Nature consists in a myriad of different “memory/oblivion” cycles.” He is apparently poised between Zen philosophy and a study of reactions applied to specific physical models of alternation, with an approach that is much less romanticized and “naive” than one may think at first glance.