Starfruit by kotori

When my wife and I went to Luang Prabang, we were astounded by how quiet it was. We live in Tokyo (where dull moments are simply not allowed) and even though it's quite clean and people are somewhat respectful, it's never totally silent.

Have you ever been to the rocky mountains? It was that quiet. No one speaking above an indoor voice and only indoors for miles around quiet. "Maybe everyone is dead" quiet. Luang Prabang the second biggest city in Laos and it's quiet like the goddamn rocky mountains.

My wife and I both have a strong interest in street markets. One of the deciding factors in the part of Tokyo we've moved to was having access to street markets. Naturally, one of the first things we checked out in Luang Prabang was the night market. It was thoroughly uninspiring. Every stall was a deja vu from three stalls ago. But the morning market, which was to be less focused on mass-produced "regional folk art" (this is to say, a copy of a copy of a copy of your own culture is something you can only sell to sucker foreigners with too much dosh and too little brains as being quaint, folksy, and genuine) and more centred on local produce, was slated to be pretty brilliant.

If you know me, you'll know this: I love creative sound and I love local produce.

And the morning market was supposed to be around from ten till four, so we went just before lunchtime.

Garbage. Just garbage was left. Beautiful piles of blemished fruit, rotting vegetables, bruised and shoddily cut banana leaves, unidentifiable puddles of liquids. Filth. Spit and cigarette butts. Starfruit.

I had a lot of space to think about sound in the silence of Luang Prabang. I felt prepared to start into a new collection of generative patches that would, hopefully, be as chaotic and evolving as those slowly decaying piles of organic trash, somehow fresh, somehow smashed and in the active process of death. Only to be picked up by the lowest caste of society, but no one knows when.

Tracks two and three of this album are purely generative. Track one includes a bit of knob wiggling, and track three includes external manipulation of gates are they were fed into a gate mangler/decoder. I hope you enjoy it. Please keep the volume high in your headphones, and if you prefer to use speakers, perhaps favour external ones over the tinny ones included in our cellphones and laptops.

cos sometimes you don't want to listen to music
なぜならたまに音楽をそんなに聴きたくないし。

high volume recommended
音大きくして聞いてください。

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