Hachiku was recorded in Togatta Onsen, Miyagi, Japan during June of 2024, during the artist residency Togatta 044.
All instruments were cut and tuned by hand using fresh hachiku bamboo which was growing outside the residency.
This album is a meditation on breath, sound, and the resonances of nature.
Instead of tuning each bamboo pipe precisely to create a complex just intonation or microtonal tuning, I tuned each bamboo to the frequency that it best resonates, or a frequency that triggered many non-interger harmonics. Each bamboo was played as a breath-sound meditation while listening to the previous tracks, many which contained sounds of the surrounding nature: rain, birds, wind.
This album was a way for me to explore tuning and microtonality through a new lens: impermanence, nature's measure, breath, and sound meditation.