OUT JULY 14, 2023
One of LINE’s earliest artists, Miki Yui, returns exactly 20 years after her last album on the label, silence resounding (LINE_015). Here she presents five new intuitive experiments created on modular synths to acoustically shift environments. One of the formative microsound / lowercase artists, Yui continues to create sublime small sounds in a changing, loud world.
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In 2018, my first visit in the Amazonian rainforest in Manaus, Brazil became an important experience that changed my perception of the environment.
The sounds I heard in the forest were, I felt, very similar to the sounds I have been creating since 1999. It was so touching to feel the sounds of the forest as if they were coming from inside myself—so embedded in my artistic universe and vice versa. Even more, I felt my body and the forest as one. We breathe and sweat together, the forest is a part of human body, we are part of the forest.
My artistic practice starts from observing the environment, and creating ‘another environment’ through sounds, in which the ‘natural’ and the ‘artificial’ merge. By creating another environment, I strive to create a musical structure which reveals the relationships, or further weaves new relationships between different matters within the environment.
Music can provide a different kind of narrative through non-verbal relationships, because sounds have the ability to touch us directly and physically, and trigger our imagination.
Eventually I started to work with modular synthesizers. Sounds from the synthesizer have astonishing similarities to the sounds that I experienced in the rainforest. Since I have little idea about the modular synths, I create sounds intuitively. The complex structure of modular synthesis allows me to incorporate random operations into my music. The process of discovering the sounds, watching the sounds flow out of these machines, and creating music with those sounds with minimum intervention… is the same approach that I have been taking with field recordings, like in my previous releases on LINE in 2001 and 2003.
Strömen (Streams in German) has emerged from my experiments with modular synthesizers between 2021-2023, these are examples of ‘another environment’ that are in continuous transformation in itself. Hopefully these sounds will help transform the relationship between the listeners and their environment.
—Miki Yui, May 2023
