Despite a lack of rain, the river still flows. Fairly recently, I remarked on the surprisingly steady stream of Celer-related material which was still emerging. It has now become a cascade, tumbling down with such speed and volume that a new vessel has been created to hold some of the overflow: Two Acorns. Two Acorns is a new imprint curated by Celer’s Will Long and dedicated to Danielle Baquet-Long, which will focus (understandably) on “sentimentality, in all its forms”, which will include not just recordings, but also books. The first bottling from this freshly-assembled vat is a fine blend of Celer and sound artist Yui Onodera, labelled Generic City.

The two (or indeed three) never actually met during the recording process. This was a purely long distance relationship, with Onodera remaining in his native Tokyo, and Celer in Los Angeles. Given that both use the same modus operandi, namely combining field recordings from the city with electronics and acoustic instruments, the result smears one city into the other, emphasising their similarity as much as their differences. As much as the album is about Tokyo or Los Angeles, it is about the things that they, and indeed other cities share (hence the “Generic City” of the album’s title), and the links which bind them. The mall chatter and traffic hum could originate from either, as could much of the instrumentation: guitar, violin, cello and piano spill out softly from the speakers, lingering in the sustained spaces derived in some way from Japanese gagaku and minimalist western classical music, without explicitly referencing either. Only rarely in fact do the sounds obviously relate to one city or the other: the sound of prayer or schoolchildren singing can be fixed with some certainty, and the drones at times take on the feel of a giant Buddhist singing bowl. I’m on shakier ground when it comes to the flock of birds which opens the album: a number of species of birds migrate from the US to Japan, tracing a natural arc between the respective lands.

And of course it isn’t only the birds which would travel between the two: a large chunk of the recording emanates from the environs of an airport, with its final calls and runway roar, the sound of bridges being built between cities in the sky. Despite what the map may suggest, the album quietly makes the point that Tokyo and Los Angeles aren’t as far apart as they once were. As a music box twinkles softly in the background, this Generic City feels like home.

http://mapsadaisical.wordpress.com/2010/11/10/yui-onodera-and-celer-generic-city-two-acorns/

Two Acorns is a new label started by Will Long, one half of Celer. He deals with ‘things you can hold in your hand, or keep on your bookshelf, to keep these feelings, memories, and experiences. There is no replacement for the smell of a book, the spin of a CD player starting’. Hear hear. The label starts of with a collaborative release of his band Celer (which was Long and his partner Danielle Baquet-Long, who passed away) and Yui Onodera. The latter provides field recordings, electronics, guitar, violin, piano and musical box, while Celer holds the mixing board, cello, violin, piano, field recordings, theremin, electronics and ocarina. I am not sure but I don’t recall seeing many collaborations of Celer, but the result, four lengthy pieces work out quite well. Its probably everything you would expect from such a collaboration (you could debate whether that is good or bad), but the gentle, sustaining, of course drone – a word that can’t be avoided when talking about Celer nor Onodera – like atmospherics work quite well, but what seems interesting is that many of the field recordings go unprocessed into the mix. Lots of rain, water, animals, street sounds, stuff that seems to be picked up with contact microphones and such like, and they bathe quite well in the string of sounds woven together on the various instruments. They add a great spice to the music, which doesn’t stick that much in the world of ‘just’ drones too much. Beautifully ringing overtones, ‘heavy’ street sounds, air traffic and crackling of leaves: together they create a mighty fine aural landscape. Beautiful. (FdW)

Ein wunderbares Nachthimmelfoto von Danielle Baquet-Long ziert das Klappcover. Die jung verstorbene Künstlerin ist immer noch allgegenwärtig in der liebenden Erinnerung ihres Celer-Partners und Ehemanns Will Long. Die Kollaboration mit dem ähnlich umweltbewussten Japaner basiert auf geteilten Vorlieben für feierabendliche Stimmungen, Natureinsamkeit, einer Sehnsucht nach Veränderung, die einen in der Nähe von Flughäfen erfasst. Onodera, 2007 mit dem DRONE-Gütesiegel versehen, tönt die vier gemeinsamen Dröhnscapes mit Gitarrensound und Geige, Celer mit Strings, Theremin, Ocarina. Basis sind aber Feldaufnahmen, wie der schöne Einstieg in ‚An Imaginary Tale of Lost Vernacular‘ mit den Schreien von Wildgänsen. Verlorene Heimatsprache heißt auch verlorenes Zuhause. Ausserhalb von Arkadien bleibt nur ‚The Street Of A Rainy, Gray Day‘ und auf Bahnhöfen und in der trappelnden, geschwätzig lärmenden Masse ein Bewusstsein, auch ‚A Renewed Awareness of Home‘. Balsam für die wunde Seele ist der Drone, sonores, summendes, wenn auch noch dunkles Gedröhn. Beschwörender noch ist die rituelle Litanei eines japanischen Volksbrauchs. Ich halte es da mit Ernst Bloch: Die wirkliche Genesis ist nicht am Anfang, sondern am Ende, und sie beginnt erst anzufangen, wenn Gesellschaft und Dasein radikal werden, das heißt sich an der Wurzel fassen… Hat er (der Mensch) sich erfasst … so entsteht in der Welt etwas, das allen in die Kindheit scheint und worin noch niemand war: Heimat. [BA 68 rbd]

http://www.badalchemy.de/

A special website for Two Acorns has also been created by the wonderful Kitchen studio, who I owe an incredible amount of thanks to for this, and all of their help with Generic City.

Generic City is the debut release of Two Acorns, presented in a custom-designed CD package created by mondii with photography by Danielle Baquet-Long and mastered by Taylor Deupree.

Press Release:

“For this collaboration work, I made a lot of field recordings. Songs of migratory birds that come to a big lake only in winter, the sound of breaking ice, frozen on a lake, the peal of huge bells in a temple, voices in prayer to the Buddha, footsteps in the subway, machine sounds at a construction site, rain flowing into a steel pipe, the oscillation sound of rubbing iron which was recorded through a contact mic set on steel, the conversations of people walking in the city, noise of vehicles and trucks, kids voices from an elementary school and so on. Like a time trip to transcend places these sound-scapes are presented as a imaginary tale. To collaborate with foreign artists became a chance for facing Japan again for me. Reflecting on each of our localities to compose let us be aware anew of the vernacular which has been lost in the global world.” – Yui Onodera

“We contributed many instrument sounds and field recordings, the streets of LA, rain on our doorstep, water draining into the gutter, cars passing on wet and slippery streets, people walking on their way home from work, talking in an airport baggage claim, airliners flying over, riding bikes through traffic, conversations in restaurants, the Metro Link train in LA. In mixing, since we were working with someone’s instrument sounds and field recordings from a city that we haven’t visited, much was left to our imagination to re-create an environment and city setting. When these two entirely different cities came together it created an all new way of looking at and hearing the city’s movements around us.” – Danielle Baquet-Long, Will Long

Available directly through Two Acorns

Also available from these stores: Darla, Experimedia, Infraction, Playing By Ear, Databloem, Norman Records, Slow Flow, Rhythm Online, Boa Melody Bar, Boomkat, and Basses Frequences

Celer’s output over recent times has been prolific to say the least, and now Will Long (one-half of the duo) sets up his own label, Two Acorns. For this new imprint’s inaugural release Celer collaborate with Japanese artist Yui Onodera, with mastering duties performed by 12k boss Taylor Deupree. While much of the established Celer sound centres upon thoughtful, droning austerity this album is given a very different shape by extensive field recording work from both Los Angeles and Japan involved. Woven into this tapestry of environmental sounds and floating tonality you’ll hear migratory birds, ice breaking on a frozen lake, temple bells and sounds made by people in restaurants or on public transport systems. It’s becoming difficult to keep up with Celer’s release schedule, but it’s still well worth trying to maintain pace – Generic City benefits from Onodera’s additional pair of ears, and the final mix strikes up a deftly poised balance between beautiful ambience and more revelatory acousmatic material; in its finest moments Generic City offers an absorbing, occasionally hallucinatory portal into the audio topography of urban spaces.

http://boomkat.com/cds/352607-yui-onodera-celer-generic-city

Generic City is an almost perfect execution of collaborating. Performing together are two reputable acts in ambient and experimental music, consisting of Japanese composer and multi-instrumentalist Yui Onodera as well as the prolific Californian duo of Celer. With both collaborators being immensely talented in their own rights, the pooling of their separate ideas has equated to four movements of boundlessly stellar exploration.

These 47 minutes represent a combination of two cultures and lifestyles from each of their perspectives. Yui Onodera incorporates recordings of Japans variety of customs: children playing, temple bells, voices in prayer to Buddha, among many others. Celer present sounds from the metropolitan lifestyle of Los Angeles: cars passing, conversations between people in restaurants, pedestrians within a plethora of other sounds. All of this incorporated found sound from their locations is intertwined with the use of musical instruments as well; guitar, electronics, violin, cello, and even more unconventional instrumentation like theremin and ocarina.

Rather than accenting the music itself, the field recordings are the main attraction on Generic City. Surely, the instrumentation and the ecoacoustics are in constant rotation– however the music is exceptionally minimal, with resonating hums that manifest within an attentive listen. This leaves all heads turned toward the atmospheres of each location, which bleed into one another seamlessly and allow the urban theme of these four pieces to come full circle.

Onodera and Celer acknowledge that both settings aren’t meant to be seen as two unrelated parts of the world, or a side-by-side comparison of the two cultures– but make note that though geographically distanced, these concepts are connected by nature. Generic City alludes to the idea that musicians are subconsciously influenced by their environment, and the way that the artists’ music blends with nature strongly represents this idea.

http://olive-music.blogspot.com/2010/11/review-yui-onodera-celer-generic-city.html

Celer & Yui Onodera’s collaboration, Generic City, is the inaugural release on Celer’s new label Two Acorns…

The function of good artworks, I have often read, is to provoke a reaction. Talented artists are able to elicit a response – they hold a mirror up to a person’s perception of themselves, their place in the world; making them confront a perspective that they hold and forcing them to re-evaluate it in a new light.

For example, a painting in a gallery that you dismiss on the first viewing, but find yourself drawn back to in curiosity. Stepping back a bit. Angling your head. Looking at it from a diagonal angle. There’s SOMETHING about it, but you’re not quite sure what…

Your reaction to it is solely based on what you bring to it; you are responding to what you see by reacting to your own point of view.

Those that live in cities will likely have a similar reaction to Generic City. Everyone’s perception of a metropolis is different, and this release will conjure different memories and impressions from one person to the next. It is sufficiently abstract to be able to project your own experience onto it, but also possessing enough character to be able to take a message from it.

The four tracks presented are artful meshes of field recordings, electronics, guitar, cello, violin, piano, environmental sound, Theremin, and ocarina; all recorded and composed from 2007 to 2009. All are long, none shorter than nine minutes and the longest clocking in at close to seventeen, although the length of the tracks is deceptive – it sounds different once you are on the inside. The field recordings are of varying tones and textures, some quiet and reticent, some more rambunctious and unruly.

On first viewing, these paintings do not seem to have a common theme, but upon further listens a thread emerges – in the first track, the electronic sounds slowly become less and less processed, finishing with a solitary music box. Inspection of the notes accompanying the release mention that the musical sounds were made from that one original acoustic recording of the music box, made dozens of ways, fading into the instrument by itself.

The track, “An Imaginary Tale of Lost Vernacular” is a fitting starting point, an enigmatic and intriguing mood piece that over multiple listens reveals different facets of itself. It’s representative of the album as a whole – it presents initially as quite aloof but repeated exposure draws a response from the listener, depending on what they are bringing to it.

Worth seeking the release out for the second track alone, such is the strength of “Waiting Until Something Else Happens”. A pretty evocative drone introduction followed by stereoscopic sound design. An artful rumination on plane noise to fade.

“The Street Of A Rainy, Gray Day” is just that – reflected sunlight off the street, clicks, raindrops and puddles. There’s an atonal simulation of nondescript background clatter that certainly adds to the effect. Some shuddering tremolo tones add to the tension, and passing conversation and bird noise could well be the street heard from the alley, echoing and vague.

“A Renewed Awareness of Home” is unexpectedly musical. It has the quality that I’m sure all field recordists aspire to, in that it’s a melodic soundscape, not merely a collection of textures. It most overtly captures the Eastern influence that is discernable throughout the tracks.

The hypnotic nature of all the tracks is a strong point – it has a lulling effect, creating a space that gives a different context to the textures presented in the recordings. I noticed at one point that I’d been paying attention to the interaction and placing of the musical parts, and had completely failed to notice that one field texture had faded into a completely different sound, and that the tone of the whole piece had changed without me detecting it. Taylor Deupree handled mastering, and the canvas is surprisingly even given the considerable difference in tones used.

It is that rarest of beasts – on an initial sighting it seems to be perfunctory and unremarkable, but upon further inspection it reveals itself to be an elegant and thoughtful work, deserving of repeat viewing.

Like good artwork.

By talented artists.

– Review by Alex Gibson for Fluid Radio

http://www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2010/10/celer-yui-onodera-generic-city/

Ambient music, like all electronic music, often displays an uneasy relationship between the final composition & the source materials from which it was made. i believe it was Luc Ferrari who coined the term ‘anecdotal’ for sounds that immediately declare their origins; while field recordings, as an art form, have become an entity in their own right these days, for some, use of such anecdotal sounds is anathema, rupturing the delicate abstract surface for which they strive. There are times when it seems as though Celer echo this sentiment; one only has to spend a little time with Poulaine, for instance, which lists cello, violin, theremin, “contact mics on oil paintings” & field recordings among other things as its sources, all of which are entirely lost, unidentifiable in the resultant ambient soup. That’s not exactly a complaint; i know from experience that the significance of a source can be justification enough for inclusion, irrespective of whether or not its identity is retained—this is music, after all, not documentary footage—&, in any case, on other releases Will & Dani have, indeed, allowed their sources to be more obviously demonstrative, such as Poulaine’s companion release Fountain Glider & Engaged Touches.

It’s particularly striking, then, that the opening track of Generic City, a collaboration by Celer & sound artist Yui Onodera, begins amidst an obvious field recording of the calls & honks of a large flock of what sound like swans. Titled “An Imaginary Tale of Lost Vernacular”, one detects, early on, that ambient textures are present, but they are kept at bay for some minutes before moving into the foreground. This sets the tone for the rest of the album, one in which overtly anecdotal sounds happily coexist with abstract textures; no hints of unease here. Having said that, a lack of unease can’t of itself make the abstract & anecdotal gel—nothing could—yet what Onodera & Celer establish in this track is a continuum of sorts, the music moving freely within the abstract & anecdotal poles, thereby attaining some semblance of unification. Once the abstract material has emerged, it dominates the track, but anecdotal sounds are forever lurking at the fringes, more muted than before, but thereby becoming more allusive, encrusting the music with bells & chimes, until it returns to the fore for the closing minutes. As the track ends, we move back to the anecdotal extreme, & the stark unadorned sound of footsteps walking on gravel; such a world away from that with which most of the previous quarter of an hour has been preoccupied, yet not feeling out of place.

“Waiting Until Something Else Happens” goes further, seeking to integrate the two kinds of material more thoroughly. It opens in pure ambience, the music softly rising & falling, but noise quickly takes up position at the edges once again; over time, the noise begins to make inroads, its gestures adorning & ultimately overwhelming the more gentle tones beneath. They usher in the track’s central section, a protracted episode where field recordings made at an airport take centre stage, culminating in more noise, the combination of plane sounds & water, blurring the distinction between the raw & the cooked; it’s impossible to tell, in fact, what’s sonically ‘real’ & what’s not at moments like this. The final couple of minutes are a stylistic recapitulation of sorts, all ambience, an exercise in gorgeous shimmering.

From the first couple of tracks, it’s clear that unification works best when the sharp, anecdotal edge of the field recordings is blunted somewhat, & this is demonstrated early on in “The Street Of A Rainy, Gray Day”. It’s a much more complex track, the foreground in flux, both kinds of material juxtaposed in quick succession. Generic City’s most effective moments are heard here; a sense of the abstract is what projects most, but one is constantly aware of fragments & gestures hinting at something familiar, tantalisingly kept just beyond the reach of recognition. Once again, this is diffused into a dense cloud of noise, before a strident chord, laden with pulsing overtones, appears, propelling the track in a new direction. For the rest of its duration, the impetus is maintained; field recordings often push to the front, yet for all their clarity, direct recognition remains difficult. Material constantly morphs back & forth, teasing the ear at the cusp of identity, one moment forming amorphous oscillations, another dissolving into a vast texture of busy street noise. There’s not one moment of this track that fails to engage & ignite the imagination, & it’s a very fine example indeed of the kind of fascinating interplay that can result from such disparate types of source material.

Generic City closes with “A Renewed Awareness of Home”, a mysterious slab of sound occupying a darker ambient world. The first four minutes are masterful; a viscous miasma is established, moving with the pace of tectonic plates, hypnotising the ear. The first occurence of something other comes as a shock (in fact, on first listening i actually believed the sound to have come from somewhere else); metallic strikes periodically blanch the surface of the ambient cloud, causing it to shift & alter in consistency. It’s magical stuff; unfortunately, the entrancing mood is emphatically broken by the ensuing abrupt appearance of chanting voices. In theory, such sounds ought to fit right in with the established soundworld; sadly, however, they jar unpleasantly, shattering the carefully balanced texture, the opening few minutes quickly lost & forgotten. The field recordings finally subside into another abstract episode, but it’s an altogether brighter one, & as such, only seems to worsen the overall effect.

This is, however, a very rare example of ill-judged/executed sound juxtaposition from these otherwise superb musicians; & despite the difficulties of the final track, Generic City is otherwise a tour de force of electroacoustic music. It’s really exciting to hear the anecdotal & the abstract co-exist in such a unified & fruitful way.

http://5-against-4.blogspot.com/