Clive Bell - Asakusa Follies | Clive Bell

Clive Bell - Asakusa Follies

by Clive Bell

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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Miki Yui - Mills, David Ross - Stochastic Moods, Clive Bell - Asakusa Follies, Richard Scott - Several Circles, Twinkle³ with Sidsel Endresen - Debris In Lower Earth Orbit, and Lu Katavist - Inburst. , and , .

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1.	Ultramodern Variety 05:31	info	buy track
2.	Silk Factories 04:39	info	buy track
3.	The Red Sash Society 04:20	info	buy track
4.	Golden Bat Cigarettes 06:24	info	buy track
5.	Erotic Grotesque 05:05	info	buy track
6.	The Scarlet Gang 05:00	info	buy track
7.	Five Story Pagoda 05:48	info	buy track
8.	Idle Reminiscence 04:47	info	buy track

about

Asakusa Follies is a luminous scene of interplay between melody, breath, and the shakuhachi flute.

Following on from the initial triptych of electro-acoustic releases on the Cuspeditions imprint, Clive Bell’s Asakusa Follies shifts the listener away from the studio and toward the player himself. Breath is a central theme in the album where a punctuation of purring, spitting, flicking and gasping intersects the tones, overtones and noise of the shakuhachi.

The opening composition Ultramodern Variety makes it immediately apparent that this is no traditional exploration of the Japanese bamboo flute but something altogether unique. Bell’s personal shakuhachi technique is highlighted in the four solo pieces of the album, and reveals a revisionist approach to the instrument which still honours it’s traditional elements. The distant low of the album opener flutters with multiphonics, deep in tone and subdued. Golden Bat Cigarettes celebrates the meeting of breath and bamboo where the mouth and hands on wood buzz then snaps in exhale before drifting toward eerie overtones hanging amidst silence.

The two closing pieces, Five Story Pagoda and Idle Reminiscence, explore the shrill upper registers of the flute that keen in and out of silence, melody and breath-noise shifting the ears from inside Clive Bell’s mouth, to hearing from somewhere afar. A trio of shakuhachi flutes interweave to create Silk Factories, which float gently in and out of unison. Pi-Saw is double tracked on The Red Sash Society where chords abruptly drop into one another, wavering in modulation.

The Scarlet Gang is a resting point and site of contemplation. Hmong Khene is here warm and melancholic and gives the listener a moment to bask in a sensitive cycling sequence of chords. Erotic Grotesque weaves more overdubbed shakuhachi, overblown and textural with two distinct melodies intertwining as lovers in dark and empty space.

The album takes inspiration from Yasunari Kawabata’s 1930 novel The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa. In Kawabata’s novel, the reader is lead through the vibrant and hedonistic Tokyo district by a wandering narrator, and this sense of wandering is captured in Bell’s improvisations :the shakuhachi is a restless and shifting path to follow toward contemplative calm in the bulbous swelling of reeds.

credits

released June 14, 2017

Clive Bell: shakuhachi flutes, pi-saw free reed flutes & hmong khene

Recorded November 2015 by Grant Showbiz at Street-Level III Produced by Sylvia Hallett and Clive Bell

Shibori textiles and art direction by Ecka Mordecai
Photographs by Jamie Robinson
Graphic design by Lewis Mclean

Mastered by Rashad Becker

Titles inspired by the 1930 novel, The Scarlet Gang Of Asakusa, Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972).

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Cuspeditions Salford, UK

CUSP is a new Manchester imprint championing experimental music from the hinterlands. Each of its releases aims to forage new sonic territories in electronics, improvisation and beyond.

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