Aki Onda has a long-standing reputation as a sound artist, whether developing mysterious, evocative works with overlaid, degenerating cassette tapes or building densely layered works with synthesizers and tape. Onda began this collaboration with filmmaker Paul Clipson with a 2013 performance, initially pairing a film with a live soundtrack. They continued developing the work in different forms, completing this combination LP and large collage of still-frame images before Clipson’s death in 2018. Onda excerpts four dense segments from three hours of material (including the original film projector), while Clipson’s images, a kind of visual text, include light abstractions, apartment windows, and close-ups of eyes.
Palm Held Out for Us to Read, the longest of the excerpts, introduces a synthesized bass line, one of the few conventionally musical elements here, dragging strings of chattering high frequencies with it. Onda’s technique of mixing and matching musical and purely sonic elements has the effect of dramatizing the musical content, disrupting its usual value as music, while found-sound drones and loops assume structural values. The concluding Gravity . . . Intruders is at once chilling and involving, an afterlife of sound that includes a roiling, industrial, bass-pedal tone, shards of speech, rhythmic feedback, and gradually emerging washes of unidentifiable sound.
The format of LP and collage reorganizes the synchronous relationship between music and film, the still images emphasizing memory and, in turn, an innately elegiac quality in Onda’s selected segments, further developing a sonic space at once meditative and disturbing.
Stuart Broomer has written extensively on music, mostly improvised, for both general and specialist publications, and his liner essays have appeared on CDs by musicians from some 20 countries. The author of Time and Anthony Braxton (Mercury, 2009), he is currently writing a fantasia on the life of Memphis disc jockey Dewey Phillips. He has been intermittently active as an improvising musician since 1965; his composition Found Theme for the Age of Reason appeared in Musicworks 112. He lives in Toronto.