Various Histories by Katsura Mouri & Tim Olive
Katsura Mouri: turntables
Tim Olive: pickups, metals
Recorded in Kyoto, Aug. 2010
Five tracks, total length of 34:20
Glass-mastered CD, recycled chipboard package, art by Marc Bell
Catalog Number: 845-2
Recorded near Kyoto on a sweltering summer day in 2010, in non-air-conditioned discomfort. The density of the air and the heavy fug of heat is fully present in these five untitled tracks, with distant thunder tumbling down the mountainsides and sudden nearby rumblings charged by brutal flashes of electricity, gritty heat-static and the relentless life-song of subtropical summer. Or perhaps it’s all coincidence…
Mouri’s low-tech turntables and prehistoric analog delay unit along with Olive’s magnetic pickups and variously-activated metal, wood and plastic objects merge and meld, diverge and re-combine across thirty-four abrasive, foreboding and somehow beautiful minutes.
Credits
Brian Olewnick, Just Outside:
Five tracks that, at their best, sound like where Voice Crack should have been by now had you taking their turn of the century work and plotted an upward quality graph... a brew both thick and spiky, with enough liquid continuity to flow easily but enough hard nodes to provide plenty of tooth. An implied, buried pulse often serves the music well as does a kind of transparency in the multitude of layers piled atop–there’s a fine sharpness here and a sense of unwasted action. Also a welcome habit of saying what needs to be said then stopping. All too rare, nowadays. The pieces are well varied, covering ample ground quickly and with imagination, the closing track venturing into spacier territory, a stringent whine carving out a large room sparsely occupied by dull, echoing metals–very, very well done.
Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly:
Improvising noise maker Tim Olive strikes again here, with a new disc which he recorded with Katsura Mouri over the years 2010 to 2012. Mouri (wo-)mans the turntables and is also responsible for edits and mix, while Olive plays pick-ups and metals. A five piece disc, with a total of thirty-four minutes of music, all of a more heavy nature. Its not that we are dealing with heavy noise here, but the sounds played with turntable and pickups on metal objects are recorded quite directly in a no-victims-spared manner. It bumps and bounces here, with some mighty fine deep end sound and occasional collapse in the higher frequency range. It’s the heavy weight version of AMM going all for the noise generators and without any instruments. Mouri and Olive play with great care and style – true noise is, as said, far away from this, but they are not entirely shy of it also. When it happens, it happens. In other occasions they manage to arrive at a standstill and they look around – just as in the fifth and longest (all untitled) piece happens. They stumble upon feedback and let it flow for a while and play some softish rumble with their equipment. In terms of improvisation meets noise, I thought this was a pretty fine disc, which was played in an excellent manner and had a whole bunch of interesting notions on the subject.
