Aube - Purification to Numbness (V)

Aube - Akifumi Nakajima, I should say - is by all appearances not quite your average noise artist. He started releasing noise - which he describes as sound design rather than music - under the name Aube in 1991 - around when Masami Akita started using digital recording and within a few years of the genesis of Masonna. But Aube has curious self-imposed restrictions.

Each Aube release is created entirely with one sound source - glass, the human voice, water, lamps, you name it. Purification to Numbness is one of a number made with a single voltage controlled oscillator, his third such and his seventeenth overall release in 1995. The release is a set of three soundscapes from this source. The first, "Elementary Particle," is a twisting seventeen-minute drone that sounds plausibly like an extremely effected guitar - all layered, distorted pitches and repeating sounds and sound loud, uncontrolled rock. The title track seems more meditative and features more noisy sounds, less of the midrangey Marshall amp attack. Sounds wander in and out, tending more to bathe the listener in an experience - a trip inside a machine-mind. The track spends twenty minutes building intensity before giving way (stopping as suddenly as the first track) to Aube-meets-Khlyst noisy glitches buried in the Aube wall of compressed sound. This all sounds very much like a chance-based live noise improvisation more than anything. Structure is linear and . . . unstructured. Every sound simply is.

Thanks to RRRecords for selecting this piece. I'm more than anything curious to hear more of Aube's work - it seems like a way of bringing home experimentation with sound sources and approaches, like surrounding yourself with electronics and creative minds. Certainly worth further study.