Yoshio Machida is a steel pan player and multimedia artist running operations from his joint record label / beauty parlour Amorfon out of Yokohama, Japan. Amorfon releases are unique, intricate, homespun collections pairing idiosyncratic acoustic instrumentation with canny, subtle digital processing. Scape*Dance, an AV installation originally screened at the Museum of Modern Art in Saitama, perfectly encapsulates the Amorfon agenda: a ‘dance of light’s comprised of thousands of sheets of sun-exposed photographic paper, scanned, layered and juxtaposed digitally, set to a soundtrack of both plain and processed steel pan improvisations. I wonder whether Machida plays this on loop in his salon?
Paid close attention, the images initially appear bland and lacklustre, a rapid flurry of oblongs and ovals in varied pinkish hues, haphazardly arranged and making no noticeable development. The music is similarly impenetrable, an unchanging blur of blips, pings and tics, but the warmth of these sounds, which appear to have been sourced from Machida’s favoured pans, lend them a friendliness and approachability, like a cascading waterfall of honey. This soon creeps into your perception of the visuals, which then takes on the frameless, priority-less focus of action painting, a passive bombardment of pleasing colours and tones that are easily submitted to. There’s little variance between tracks, almost none that I could notice, but for the lengthy seventh, in which all is slowed to snails pace, images left for several seconds while Machida patiently plinks his pans, like Morton Feldman holidaying in the Caribbean soused on Mai Tais. Sit back, have one yourself, and doze away to this charming release.
Joshua Meggitt
