untitled flora by Kikù Hibino
RM055
Artist's statement:
"My grandmother was a classical pianist. She loved Seven Star cigarettes and Impressionism. She was a single mother living on a hill called Otokikiyama - roughly translates to a mountain where you can hear sounds from - in a small Ivy draped home, working as a piano teacher.
I remember her playing Schumann’s Träumerei in a particularly slow tempo when I was only a little boy. Submerged in the faint glow of the sunset, my younger sister and I laid sprawled out on the black leather couch, probably eating some snacks, watching our grandmother strike the piano keys. The extreme slow tempo of Träumerei was an odd sound. It differed from her favorite Debussy or Ravel pieces she played often, and instead was kind and warm. This is how I’d come to love Schumann.
After some time, my grandmother had passed and for a while, I never listened to Schumann. I was young and I became entranced with electronic music like House and Techno. Classical music, especially from the Romantic era, started to feel outdated. Experimental electronic music was the future. I believed it was a way of embodying and experiencing our new and contemporary culture.
It was near the time I had started to seriously study electronic music in university when Schumann had reappeared into my life. I had been in the audio classrooms where I would keep picking up and hearing the words Mille Plateaux. Turns out, it was an independent record label based in Frankfurt. An older student had explained to me that the origin, name and concept of the label came from a book written by two philosophers, Deleuze and Guattari. I immediately bought it and started reading. Throughout the wonderfully poetic phrases, Schumann was mentioned quite frequently. I didn’t understand why this new experimental genre had anything to do with Schumann, or why he was so important to the future of sound. I was shocked. The text was so difficult and abstract, I doubted my comprehension of the book, but I continued to read it over and over keeping the topic of Schumann at the center.
“The Schumannian body does not stay in place…. The intermezzo is consubstantial with the entire Schumannian oeuvre….At the limit, here are only intermezzi….The Schumannian body knows only bifurcations; it does not construct itself, it keeps diverging according to an accumulation of interludes….”
The Mille Plateaux book I bought all those years ago still sits in my home studio in Chicago, only now with a spine that’s falling apart. And to this day, every time I open the book, I remember a scene of a little boy watching his grandmother strike the piano at a slow tempo. Her way of life as a single mother, the ivy that crawled its way up the sides of her home, the puff of her cigarette smoke that changed shape against the streams of sunlight. All these feelings now can be summed up with the word Schumann, becoming an intermezzi without a beginning or an end, as it continues to drift through my memories.
This piece I’m releasing from Reserve Matinee, Untitled Flora, is a recording of mine that has never been released elsewhere. When I was in school, I was told to never name a piece Untitled, and that the time to do so had passed. The memories of my grandmother, who lived through the post WWII music and art, is at the core of this piece and so I’ve decided to purposefully leave the word untitled. It’s composed of an electric guitar, a volume pedal and a loop pedal fed through a tube amp. Only one take and minimal editing. When I recorded this piece, my son was one year old. His curiosity was a wonder. He would take his little finger and pluck each string of my guitar, like the curious pencil scribbles on a piece of paper, and it had brought a wave of inspiration. I started plucking the guitar strings just like my son, only using a finger, and layered that over in a loop. This quickly became exciting and fun for me, I immediately started recording on my DAT tapes. Since then I have recorded these tapes mostly at home, others throughout different art galleries of Chicago. This is why you can hear the applause in the recordings.
If a larger ritornello can exist inside of a smaller ritornello, my future must already exist in the memories of the past. These sounds, made up of scale lines and fingerings will continue for eternity, swaying as an intermezzo without a beginning or an end. This was one of my experiments and it still continues shifting forms today."
