Self Production Note
by
Yasunori Ogawa
My previous album, "quiet emotion," aimed to create a work that kept a distance from accepted ideas of what we know as "music" and used a great deal of field-recorded sound materials to dilute the musical elements of rhythm, melody, and harmony as much as possible.
The environmental sounds used in the last album were mainly from urban soundscapes that I captured myself in the city areas of Osaka and Kobe. They did not include any relaxing nature-oriented sounds, so the album turned away from the healing angle of music.
In making this "Fragment of My Memory" album, I had a feeling for something that would be a little closer to established "music" than that "non-musical" effort that characterized the last album. As I've aged between the two albums, I've become less self-conscious of the need to make something radical or left-field. Instead, I found myself wanting to express what was naturally springing from my mind in a more straightforward way.
When embarking upon the production, I had to take a trip back, retrace my childhood memories, and reconfirm my roots. Thus, I backtracked and followed my memories related to places that still affect me to this day. For example, the foot of the bridge over the small strait between my town and the island and the prefectural road that runs along the sea beside the breakwater. Further memories sprung from a street lined with souvenir shops near the tourist boat terminal and a small pond in the precincts of the shrine where I used to play.
Each scene that my memories bring to my mind seems to be a single scene from a single day. Still, such scenes appear not to be solitary in terms of time and place but, rather, they are layered memories made of multiple fragments, which must be memorized as if they were a separate scene. Thus, I reproduced these layers as sound fragments that I superimposed upon one another.
Such layered sounds consist of a significant percentage of musical elements. However, as in that last album, again, I have distanced myself from the act of playing instruments.
Musical expression through physical performances is lovely and enjoyable for sure. Still, I believe that the non-performance way of weaving sounds like poetry without being confined to a particular style better suits me.
The result is a quiet piece with little musical drama.
Although this album is undoubtedly a work that expresses quite personal feelings, I hope that the sound will somehow entice you into a pleasurable journey of shared memories and nostalgia.
Yasunori Ogawa (Musician / Composer)
