… This release weaves electroacoustic fragments into featherweight clumps of hiss and buzz that go skittering across the soundfield like dust kittens. The self-remixing title ostensibly refers to Yui’s instructions that the CD’s 19 drifting, open-ended tracks should be listened to in random playback mode. While such directives often fail to add much depth to ‘conceptual’ recordings, in this case it serves the purpose of keeping the CD from becoming to familiar: as a shifting configuration of interchangeable pieces, it hovers in the hinterlands of perception, surfacing only occassionally to the listener’s full attention. Like memory, Lupe‘s music is always just barely out of reach, subtly morphing so no two listens are the same. Additionally, its meant to be heard “at a transparent level in different atmospheres”. Such intentional indeterminancy suits the album well. Yui’s unobtrusive sound fragments act as an audio filter, almost imperceptibly colouring the sonic enviroment around you. Low rumbles disguise themselves as overpass interference, while clicks and whispers sneak away unheard, hidden in the folds of the electric resonance that charges every surface of contemporary living. Pockets of silence periodically pull an illusionist’s cloak over the proceedings, achieving temporary invisibility, until the hollow whistle of a crystal glass rim pierces your perception and calls you momentarily back into the mix. Ambient in the most literal sense, it challenges the persistent din around us in its own terms.
(The Wire, UK)
Like a microscopic sandstorm or an audio snapshot of a particle-sized universe, the latest offering from sound artist Miki Yui is a formless system of noises and clicks meant to stimulate memory and feeling. Natural sounds are used, as well as sampled everyday noise, all of it altered and fed back out her sampler as a kinked and edited bit of life’s soundtrack. Sharp tones resound around you dizzyingly on “miivmi”, mimicking the impossible tinkle of sunlight on crystal, which is again repeated on “koko.” Cars bustle by, while blurred conversations elude your ears, accurately painting a picture of a busy street life. “strm” is the sound your brain makes when it’s frustrated: power plant-sized hums and cycling feedback swell and recede, swell and recede, never quite allowing the dam to break but savoring the fleeting sweet tension. Yui injects a little humanity (and femininity) into a genre that is as cold and expressionless as a dead monitor.
(FAQT Magazine, US)
Yui’s record seems to skim the surface foam from recent (and highly minimal) Komet and Taylor Deupree releases and focus as closely as possible on the fragile, bubbly residue left behind. In this way, Lupe comes across as nothing so much as the ghostly remnants of electronic activity; radio waves, fleeting static, decaying sine waves. All abstraction and tone… A very quiet work, Yui’s is a contemplative musique concrete – rather like Bernhard Günter, albeit on a much more remote limb, and one in which the music seems extremely thin, but paradoxically dense. Such inacessibility makes this one baffling album, very difficult to assess and not one for those disinclined to spend hours deciphering what their music is meant to be all about.
(Grooves, US)
… 19 delicate, almost sketch-like compositions, which are made up of quiet granular hisses, ringing bell-like tones, electronic hums and distant rumbles, as well as the occasional field recording. The liner notes suggest you listen to the cd on random mode “at a transparent level in different atmospheres,” as (presumably) these ultra-quiet pieces are made complete only through interaction with the ambient noise of the listener’s environment. This delicate interplay between music and its context is one of the most intruiging aspects of such quiet microscopic minimalism, making this a compelling and often lovely listen.
(XLR8R, US)
… a work of abstract calmness where scratches, scribbles and accidenta acoustic reports, assembled in the beginning without narrative consequence and imagined to be played back in loop or random mode, form in the end a broad and peculiar idea. And if on one hand the whole project seems to be overcomed by its own substance of fortuitousness, on the other hand you can’t escape to the unusual fascination caused by its rough and oneiric reiteration.
(Blow Up, IT)
… an informal/shapeless inventory of fortuitous acoustic-natural reports, abstract onomatopeias and rough sound sketches that seem to take form according to the principles of the surrealistic automatic writings with absolutely estranging effects.
(Rumore, IT)
… She takes samples from spaces which are natural and acoustically based and presents them in a looped form. Thus she creates this work, which has 15 tracks in rather short modes as each track is about 2 to 3 minutes long. That’s the great thing about this work. Each track is quite empty, evolving around some loops, 3 or 4 within each track, but it doesn’t leap into boredom. Each one is soft and warm of tones, with a small click here and there. It is suggested to play this at a “quiet, transparant level”, which is maybe the same as play this softly, so that fills your space. Played late night, which I did while reading, at a soft volume, makes it into a small buzzing insect, a car that passes or the sound of a lightbulb. Excentely environmental surrounding.
(Vital Weekly, NL)
