Aki Onda
is a self-taught electronic musician, composer and producer, and a photographer. He is particularly known for his Cassette Memories, for which he uses field recording sounds he recorded himself as a diary. He recently started another project "Cinemage", which is composed of slide projections of still photo mages and improved music. He has collaborated with artists including Ikue Mori, Alan Licht, Michael Snow, Jac Berrocal, Linda Sharrock and others.
"For the Birds"
I took the cassette recorder with me wherever I went. It was my travel companion. When I came upon a sound I liked, I’d click the record button on, carving the magnet of memory onto tape. Like a diary of sound. Why did I keep doing this? I still don’t know. I was probably obsessed by something. After a while, an enormous bulk of field recordings began to pile up. Without listening to them over again, I tossed them into a cardboard box, and when I felt like it, during yet a new journey, I began to randomly lay sounds on top of them. In this way, the many tapes documenting my everyday life leapt across time and space, and, inhaling the odors of many places, varnished by dust and finger marks, they were transformed into strange soundscapes that were utterly severed from reality.
This album Bon Voyage! compiles those field recordings accumulated over the last 14 years. All is shaped by layering according to chance. This is a mad road movie that mingles electro-acoustic and chance operation. For myself, it is a personal record of journeys and memories. It is also a journey traversing the world that unfolds outside of the self, as well as an inner trip that submerges into the depths of the soul. It is reality as much as it is metaphor. What can this be? How to explain? Shall I call it a music that was born of hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, countless memories?