Antenna
Antenna is focused on glitching sounds.
• Artwork: Orie Inoue http://orieinoue.com
• Mastering: www.volume-objects.com
Tracklisting:
- Overlap
- Antenna
- Stroboscope
- Seagulls Circling
- Wildmint
- Finch
- Scutum
- Pictor
- Outstrip
- Trace again
- Heliotrope
- Terminal
Tomotsugu Nakamura
Tomotsugu Nakamura is a sound designer and art director residing in Tokyo, Japan.
His primary artistic practice is composing music by fragments of minimal acoustic and electronic tones and field recordings. He has released several ambient albums from laaps, kaico/spekk, white paddy mountain and audiobulb.
Reviews
Musique Machine
At the midpoint of Tomotsugu Nakamura’s Antenna, a tiny finch appears, in one of the most captivating and convincing compositions on the Tokyo-based ambient composer’s latest release. The finch’s arrival is short-lived, sadly. The interlude in question, “Finch-2023-07-29”, clocks in at a paltry 44 seconds, though the other eleven cuts on the album are no drawn-out feats either.
Overall, Antenna’s pacing, sparsely sequences by clicks and cuts, is breezy if somewhat familiar. After our finch sighting, it almost feels like it’s time to hit the dance floor, as the general mood of the album’s second half is downright mirthful. But there is too little carryover, durationally speaking anyway, for things to blossom into full-on beats. Instead, Nakamura’s microtonality – the fertile ground on which Antenna is sowed – requires an economy of listening predicated on close attention. Lose focus, and the whole structure becomes a flimsy architecture of those ubiquitous bleeps.
The smallness of Nakamura’s musical gestures makes the deliberate choice of limiting each composition’s length all the more poignant. There is no greater whole on Antenna to which its constituent parts ultimately belong, no background matrix of predetermined contrasts that ever get the opportunity to swallow these tiny little birds, and flowers (“Heliotrope-2023-07-29” is another favourite of mine) before they move to the next track, their only vestige the subtle attenuation of careful, conscious listening. Sonically, there is little here to reinvent the softer reaches of the ambient spectrum, but to measure the merits of Antenna against such criteria would run the risk of scaling up, zooming out, when the current view is just fine as is. Somewhere, Bruno Latour is smiling.
A release for fans of microtonal ambient work, with emphasis on the “micro”. Highly recommended! 4/5
Original article > HERE
Andrulian
This is an excellent album, it’s quite hard to describe being somewhere between minimal, ambient and drone.
Tomotsugu uses a variety of sound sources which have been glitched and looped but what makes this so good is the nature of glitching and looping which creates intricate and complex melodic and rhythmic tracks and often the glitch artifacts provide rhythmic elements. This is the central theme and each track is a variation on this theme using different sound sources.
01. Overlap: Glitched guitar, synth and metallic sound create a ambient rhythmic melody with a looped, glitched quality.
02. Antenna: A rhythmic, jumpy loop which also provides a melody, it’s minimal and really well layered.
03. Stroboscope: A melodic loop with an arp quality, glitches provide a percussive element.
04. Seagulls Circling: Layered Piano loops give a soothing ambience accompanied by subtle glitches providing a rhythmic element.
05. Wildmint: A bell / chime loop with drone elements and a nice touch of almost reversed glitch.
06. Finch: A short track with a glitchy, rhythmic percussive feel.
07. Scutum: Layered synth and beeps create a rhythmic, glitchy, melodic loop.
08. Pictor: This continues in a similar vein to Scutum, it’s a similar rhythmic, glitchy sound with just an edge of tension.
09. Outstrip: A jazzy looping vibe with a strong glitch aesthetic.
10. Trace Again: Reversed glitched synth creates a really intricate melodic and rhythmic looping track.
11. Heliotope: An ambient / lo-fi looping drone kind of vibe. It has a laid back, subtle glitchy track.
12. Terminal: A minimal, melodic ambient loop with glitched elements.
Original article > HERE