So much artistic work is made around the hallucinatory potential of the night, but what about the dawn? Shinonome is a reminder that the emergence into daylight brings with it a uniquely porous consciousness. Just as the sun has yet to rinse away the darkness completely, the listener emerges into the dawn still swilling with nocturnal residue. Environment and consciousness both perch upon the crossfade between dream states and sensory lucidity. The album takes the sound of “real” spaces and events – the cawing of crows, the idle dripping of water, the commotion of a distant public – and twists them into temperate electronic interventions, as dream reasoning continues to apply its whim to the melting of bells and the smearing of footsteps. Choral voices act as a common refrain, encapsulating this night-day liminality as they rise out of the certainty of the body and reach for the rafters, clasping at an elsewhere. Whispers and mutterings also appear frequently, chopping air like the wings of pigeons and gulls, swerving between Japanese, Chinese, English and German, or shaking out of the confines of language altogether to let the mouth unravel.
Of course, the romance of the dawn is overly simplistic. These walks are not always opportunities for playful daydreaming, and many bring a restless psyche along with them. “Revealing Unknown Beings” might situate itself among birdsong, yet the creaking bedframe and uncertain whimpers project the remains of an unsettled sleep. “The Lowest Level Of The Ocean” takes on a more scenic hue, with choral voices like sunlight slanting over ponds and silhouetted reed beds, yet there’s a sombre energy infiltrating the picture. The softened boundary between opposites brings dualities into rich dialogue – inner and outer, day and night, here and there – and also collapses emotions into one another. The sad spills into the serene and vice versa.
(attnmagazine.co.uk)
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Shinonome, released July 10 on the LA label LINE, explores the relationship between dawn and walking – specifically, the acoustics of dawn and how it relates to an early morning walk. Tomoko Hojo and Rahel Kraft have absorbed the dawn, with its shimmering glow and peaceful narrative. Distant bells ring in a new day, footsteps scrunch over dried leaves, and birds begin to orchestrate their daily dawn chorus. Shinonome is at its heart a natural record.
Through field recordings and pipe-thin drones, a sedate light softly awakens the soundscape, giving it a little nudge. The Japanese word refers to a specific experience of light at dawn, and the emerging voices are also soft whispers, shaking off the intoxication of sleep with every shushed syllable. Dawn is a sacred, indistinguishable time, an in-between separating night from the brilliance of day, opaque dreams from the 20/20 of reality, and reverential silence from a growing volume. Supernatural events are rooted in the dark, whereas the daylight banishes them. Flowers lean towards the sunshine and droop in the dark.
The hour amplifies other senses. As dawn is often visualized through photography, paint, or the naked eye, it’s refreshing to hear a take on it. Mixing acoustic and electronic sounds together can also be thought of as blending the natural with the artificial; sunlight versus the unnatural glow of arc-sodium lights. Light and darkness are symbolic of health and illness, of what we deem good and what we deem evil (Nosferatu couldn’t withstand the first rays of sunlight and became a vapour), so the record can also be thought of as a philosophical study; its foundations are deep. The ethereal sound manages to capture the understated, shy, and absolutely gorgeous timeframe, a new-born every 24 hours, but a period which is often overlooked or slept through. Sunrise is and has always been worshipped, and Shinonome successfully captures the soul of first light.
(fluid-radio.co.uk)
