Hideki Umezawa (Pawn) launches Symbolic Interaction’s pragmatism series with this 4 track and 4 remixes Kitchen ep. Combining piano and guitar acoustic elements with kitchen noises, sampled and manipulated, in an electro-acoustic frame with a bright minimal landscape pervading the sensibility. ‘Oven, Sink’ opens, fixing the glitched out rollicking static with melodic continuity of the piano guitar interaction. Geskia offers a two part remix, the first taking the samples and electronic elements and exploring their state, creating beat and structure from elements akin to fractured drum and bass glitch experiments. The second remix of ‘Oven, Sink’ adds mother and child cutup samples and concentrates on the acoustic elements, piano and guitar largely unprocessed with a busy yet discrete play of scattered electronic noise and patter.
‘Cup and Dishes’ moves around the samples sharpened with a quick clatter and water elements arrive appropriately. All the play here duels with the bright guitar elements which underpin the content and help avoid experimental extremism for its own sake. While the original bustles with quiet action the Chip remix strips back ‘Cup and Dishes’ to the acoustic elements adding a muffled heartbeat, stutter effects and a vocal as instrument highlight. ‘Oil & Bread’ the longest track holds the greatest depth of sound manipulation and movement, replacing the overly busy scape for the length of play each sound possibility holds. It also holds a somewhat warmer acoustic feel with greater success at the melding of electronic and acoustic elements. The Fjordne remix really takes advantage of this temperament remaking it into a dubbed out cycle with wavering background and a hint of carpeted crackle lining its domain eventually overlaid with a bright clutter on the dubbed out frame.
Kitchen is a revealer in general, of sound sources not disguised, yet profoundly changed, and experimental play jostling with traditional acoustic elements defining a skill not oblique to either a history or future sense of sound domains. Hideki Umezawa’s frenzied quiet aesthetic is sound nectar.
Innerversitysound
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