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. The album cover is a square crop of the full 2:3 photograph. A small signed and numbered edition of 15, printed on archival Japanese washi; each order includes an album download code, made to order and shipped worldwide. Buy the print →
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More of Nonturn's photographs of the city: @nonturn ›
Repeating Town
Every sound on Repeating Town was recorded in and around Koenji, Tokyo — traffic signals, footsteps, air conditioning units, construction, passing cars, fragments of speech. None of it is remarkable. These are the sounds a city keeps in the background, the ones you stop hearing. But this is not a documentary about Koenji.
The recordings are cut away from the time and place they came from, repeated, and layered. Fragments of reality are set into a different order, and while the grain of nonfiction remains, their meaning shifts: a world that does not exist takes shape.
The method is closer to the logic of paper cutting than to collage. Fragments of sound are cut from a single surface of reality and rearranged with their shape and origin intact. No matter how far they are processed, each one remains a footstep somebody walked, a vibration from a building, an event that actually took place at a certain hour. And the material here is not only sound. The time and the place each sound belonged to are material as well.
Sampling, here, is not a technique for reusing existing recordings. It is also a refusal to leave the starting point of music entirely to sounds that were designed and manufactured in advance. A city holds sounds that belong to it alone, each one tied to a particular time and a particular place. A signal, a footstep, the drone of an air conditioning unit — none of them can be produced again under exactly the same conditions. This music is built out of fragments that happened once.
All seven tracks unfold within a shared time of 96 BPM. That time carries over from the previous album, Territory. The tempo follows the rhythm of lived time: walking, stopping, waiting at a signal, walking on.
Because they share that time, sounds recorded in different places can coexist in one flow, and the tracks interlock while remaining separate. As a DJ joins one track to the next to make a continuous stretch of time, the seven landscapes become a single miniature world.
Repeating Town remixes the reality of the city in a post-club grammar. It is also a practice of not entrusting the starting point of music to off-the-shelf instruments and existing formats alone.
Credits: All music, artwork, mastering and photography by Nonturn (Nozom Yoneda).
Tracklisting:
- Indicate
- Atonement
- Repetition
- Stagnant
- Fathom
- Disrupt
- Perpetual
Video - making the sounds' origin visible
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.
Nonturn
Nonturn is the experimental music project of Nozom Yoneda, a composer born in Kanazawa and based in Tokyo. He takes the sounds that already play in everyday life as material, and by repeating and editing them, raises them into music — connecting a post-club editing sensibility with field sampling.
He debuted on a UK drum'n'bass label in 2004 and, through club and electronic music, moved toward his current sampling-based practice. On Audiobulb Records he has released Territory (2018) and Jellybeans (2023); Repeating Town (2026) is his third album.
His work extends beyond music into film and spatial audio. He scored every episode of the NHK Educational series Mitateru Forze (Prix Jeunesse 2024, Best Prize and others) and composed for the Osaka Healthcare Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, Kansai. In recent years he has developed A2MVE, a self-built application that syncs the footage filmed at the moment of recording with the structure of the music, working across sound and image.
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