Leedian - Light

Leedian is Japanese sound artist Hitoshi Asaumi, and Light is his debut for blue tapes.

Despite opening with a head-cleaning Merzbow or Astro-esque squall, Light is not simply a noise release. As beats start to emerge from under the wreckage of zeros and ones you’re reminded of Autechre, and the way that duo use percussion as kind of aural stepping stones to guide the listener through a world oppressive with sound, where unfathomable shapes loom out at you from either side of the path: huge shark-sized blocks of sound that sniff at you inquiringly before slithering back into an ocean-deep distortion.

We don’t know how Hitoshi conjures these constructions, but, also like Sean and Rob, we suspect a lot of it is rendered in the human-to-machine interface of hardware, rather than more ethereal software or generative compositions. You can imagine Hitoshi striking in the beats and tones manually, building up an organic soundworld that is ultimately closer to free jazz than anything computational.

Each piece of audio information glistens and shivers under examination. Each piece is an object composed of infinite surfaces, fluctuating constantly; almost phantasmal.

Light ends with a gentle tinkling of ivories, the twang of a double bass, and seventh chords pushing us out of this 30-minute reverie: a hallucination of jazz.