Music for Dance Art Hong Kong

AMG Review of Music for Dance Art Hong Kong

François Couture
All Music Guide

The two pieces on this album were created for the dance troupe Dance Art Hong Kong. They were recorded in the summer of 1999, while Otomo Yoshihide was still at a turning point. He has a knack for turning stage production commissions into laboratories for trying out new ideas. That's what happened here. The first piece, "Vinyl Tranquilizer No. 2," revisits a concept developed on an EP in 1997. A suite of 24 segueing compositions of exactly one minute each, it illustrates very well the transformation Yoshihide's art had already undergone. The piece begins with Sachiko M.'s sampler with sine waves. Vinyl surface noises join in after a couple of minutes and things escalate to slabs of /p>

oise and minimalist retreats. The textures and colors change every 60 seconds. Yoshihide scurries among the remains of his past projects to find a new direction, taking listeners from Ground Zero's harsh /p>

oise to the Spartan purity of Filament. The second piece is the 25-minute "Memory Disorder No. 6." Whatever you expect, it will surprise you. Determinedly ambient, it couples light sine wave work from Sachiko M. with lush synth pads, delicate vinyl surface noise, and an unusual spacy feeling. It leaves a lot of space for body movements and hints at the music of Cathode, but never even attempts to reach that level of abstraction. The two pieces are as antithetic as possible, making this a strange but quite appealing CD.