Variations

The theme of Variations focuses upon production per se, intentionally excluding leading elements like visuals or narratives, as has often been the case with many of Hatakeyama’s earlier works. For Variations, Chihei Hatakeyama embraced the opportunity to contemplate his own compositional techniques – to understand its meaning and the processed sound, resulting from his usual production method of composing in real-time DSP software environments, where heavily processing of pre-recorded sound material transforms into different forms, often to an extent with no traces of the originals.

This is very evident in Variations, with recorded sounds of electric guitar, vibraphone and piano making up the constituent parts, with the addition of subtly processed field recordings. In observation of sound particles in his own production, Hatakeyama noted repetitive patterns in transformed states of his sounds, reminiscent the palettes of water. Whether driven from a personal point of experimentation or naturally formed, the traces of water are present in the sound material of his latest work, despite not being the primary motif. To replace the working title ‘Water’, Variations was born from the fact that Hatakeyama began producing the album tracks in late 2008 at a time when composing with MIDI was abandonded in favour of playing sound files on Reaktor and Max/MSP. Thus dawned the idea of infinite possibilities sound files have in nature and the concept of variations played on sound files.

Tracklisting:

1. Variation for Electric Guitar I (06:06)
2. Variation for Piano I (08:23)
3. Variation for Electric Guitar I (10:00)
4. Variation for Piano II (09:35)
5. Variation for Electric Guitar and Vibraphone (12:46)
6. Variation for Piano III (05:24)

Previews:

3. Variation for Electric Guitar II
Variation for Electric Guitar II – Chihei Hatakeyama (from the forthcoming Variations, SOUND004)

6. Variation for Piano III
Variation for Piano III – Chihei Hatakeyama (from the forthcoming Variations, SOUND004)

Released: Oct 15, 2010
Format: CD
Price: $17.00 (incl. P&P)