Repeating Town

The city’s fragments repeat, overlap and resonate — a quietly grooving electronic landscape built only from field-recorded samples.

Repeating Town does not ask what the city sounds like, but how the city can be made to function as music. Every sound on the album was captured in and around Koenji, Tokyo: traffic signals, footsteps, air conditioners, construction, passing cars and fragments of conversation. These recordings are traces of real places, but they are not presented as documentary evidence or atmosphere. They are cut, repeated, layered and placed on a 96 BPM grid as sampling material.

The title points to the method. The everyday city is already full of repetitions: signals return, footsteps pass, machines hum, routes repeat, voices appear and disappear. Nonturn listens to those repetitions not as background, but as a musical condition. Once removed from their original setting, the sounds stop describing where they came from and begin to act as rhythm, texture, accent, resonance and silence.

What matters here is not the novelty of using non-instrumental sound, but the grammar that makes those sounds function musically. Rather than documenting Koenji, Nonturn turns it into a self-contained miniature world: the city is sampled, arranged on a steady 96 BPM grid, and made to move according to its own internal logic. It is less a record of a place than a private miniature city, built from samples and played from within. In that sense, Repeating Town is closer to musique concrète after club music than to ambient soundscape: a post-club electronic work made from the repeating surface of daily life.

All seven tracks share the same pulse, connecting the album back to Territory as part of a continuous listening environment. Where Territory built the recorded streets of Tokyo into a single soundscape, Repeating Town takes the same field-sampling method and organises it around that steady pulse — close to club music in its sense of grid and repetition, but deliberately outside the four-on-the-floor logic of techno.

Each sound on the album was recorded together with real footage of the moment it was captured. A2MVE — a custom Ableton-to-video application developed specifically for this album — reconstructs that footage from the structure of the session itself: which sounds are active, when, and how many at once. When sounds overlap, the city divides on a split screen; when the music repeats, the image repeats with it. Nothing is generated; every frame is real footage. AI was used not to create images, but to help design the editing rules and extend the artist’s editing process to a density that would be impractical to cut by hand. An Ableton session edits the city.

Photography: The cover and print edition come from Nonturn's own close-up photographs of the city — fragments of walls, surfaces and peeling paint found on walks through Tokyo. For years he has photographed these small abstract details, convinced the city hides painterly images in plain sight: the same method as the music, the city as material.

Credits: All music, artwork, mastering and photography by Nonturn (Nozom Yoneda).

Nonturn

Nonturn is the experimental project of Nozom Yoneda, a Kanazawa-born composer based in Tokyo, connecting a post-club editing sensibility with field sampling to build music from the sounds of the city without a single instrument. Working across film, commercial and television scoring as well as experimental music, he debuted on a UK drum’n’bass label in 2004 and moved through club and electronic music toward a samplingbased practice. Previous albums Territory (AB077) and Jellybeans (AB136) are out on Audiobulb Records.