Residing in Barcelona since 1999, Koji Asano is a 30-year-old Japanese composer worldwide known from his on-going music research that ranges from solo piano works and film soundtracks to experimental, heavy electronic areas. A short description of his 6 albums released on his own Solstice label in 2003 makes only a small part of the total collection that's close to 40!

"Absurd Summer" is a set of relatively short pieces of crude electronics. Like on most of his records Asano keeps things minimal here and works with a limited number of sound sources. This time it's a prepared piano - sometimes so heavily processed that it gets similar to bells, other times it sounds like a hammer banging on metal sheets. As the record moves on, you can see there are many ways to get quite broad sound pallette out of a single source. From almost clear piano playing through rusty sounds to harsh, metallic noises. All tracks seem excerpts from larger forms rather than complete pieces. Quite a difficult record to get through, but as many Asano's works it requires time, and a few attempts to embrace.

"Piano Suite vol. 1", credited to Asano (without Koji!), continues the piano thread, but in a very different way. This time is the real music. 20 piano miniatures were composed by Asano exclusively for Isao Otake - his long time cooperator. Paradoxically, these gladsome tunes played on a well tuned piano turn out to be more difficult for me to apprehend than the raw and distorted sounds of 'Absurd Summer'! I guess mainly musically educated people who will appreciate the nuances of Isao Otake's playing. Personally, I am more of a sound consumer than music expert, so I'm giving up further inquiry now.

Of this set of Asano's records "Gondola Odyssey" is my favourite one. 4 lengthy compositions featured here yield powerful yet pleasant doses of noise abuse. According to the title, there's really some feel of traveling to it. Each track is a 'no beginning nor end' wide band of constantly flowing sound streams. They differ slightly from each other with intensity of sound, textures and amounts of sonic layers, but the general nature of these compositions is the same. It's much in vein of Phil Niblock's, or Francisco Lopez's music. The music is droning, buzzing, hissing and having all these things an average noise consumer wants to get from his favourite record. I'm not sure here, but "Gondola Odyssey" seems to be an entirely electronic produced album. Great!

Another big twist! "'Zoo Telepathy" matches well the canon (if there's any!) Koji Asano worked out in the past. He combines playing on real instruments with processed field recordings. This time he uses the violin to compose pieces bordering on cacophony in which multi-tracked monotonous chords make a sort of hard-to-break-through wall of sound juxtaposed with as thick as loud, heavily prepared field recordings (of unknown sources). There's not much left to say but these three, lengthy pieces make a real challenge for noise/improv consumers. I think now of the debut album of Clock DVA, the same feeling, but music wise no comparison. As Asano has noticed himself, "Zoo Telepathy" is like a chorus of flies in the zoo, and that's a very apt metaphor to describe what's going on here. Very interesting and attractive (yes!) album!

With "Wind Gauge" Asano returns to the piano, putting it in a different context. The idea behind the record is to play the piano along with buzzing and hissing summer insects behind a window. The mics places in the grass caught the sound environment built up in a dozen or so various periods of a day. The insects reverb different in the morning, different in the afternoon, and still different in the evening, and as Asano has noted it sometimes took him a few hours to start playing in the moment of the insects' increasing activity. The cicadas with their sound behaviours make a quite thick wall of a sonic vagueness, while Asano plays his things, as it's impossible, in my opinion, to imitate insects' sound. Thus we get quite unusual improvised piano album with a solid backdrop of field recordings. A really fine sound adventure! Try this! 'Wind Gauge' was previously available as a CD-R album in 2000.

"The Gaint Squid - A Collection of Short Pieces vol. 1 (Works from 1997-1998)" comprises works from Asano's Tokyo period, and differs a little from the records made in Barcelona . This is a fantastic mixture of heavy electronics, rumbling motifs, audio collages, low frequencies, drones, buzzing, musique concréte, prepared sounds, abrassive noise, harsh soundscapes, sound waves, loops, and a helluva of other tricks and techniques Koij Asano's become famous of! The album is mostly electric, but there're also some parts where he plays piano and violin in a very passionate way. It's a collection of offshoots from his full length albums which back then used to be single trackers of about one hour in length. You can find fragments, or miniatures of "Monsoon" (1999), "Sunshine Filtering Through Foliage" (1999) and "Vacant Land" (1998).

If you wish to start digging through Asano's vast output, you should start from this album! The material is a stylistic cross-section through his career, and can give you a hint of what he did in the past and more recently. Anyway, I recommend getting to know, as much as you can, Koji Asano's catalogue. It's quite unlikely there are two albums that are alike, which proves his artistically prolific output is exceptional and worthwhile!!!

[krzysztof sadza]

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