aus
Everis
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…an absolutely beautiful album. – Olafur Arnalds
The whole album is just something gorgeous to drift away from everyday life with. – Elizabeth Alker, BBC3
We are delighted to partner with Flau Records of Japan to release this beautiful album by their founder. The depth and artistry of this album has made it a high point of the year. We hope to work with them again and develop the appreciation of their output and his work.
Following a major burglary at his home/studio and label HQ, from which he lost his entire catalogue of completed and work-in-progress music, Fukuzono decided to create something away from the precarious confines of his PC and more from the inner sanctum of his mind. Armed with only some basic stems salvaged from an audio/video installation project he had been working on with contemporary artist Karin Zwack, Fukuzono set about combining the long-existent melodies in his head with the video and remaining field recordings on his phone, in order to create musical synapses between memories which had remained unconnected.
Fukuzono states: “In doing so, I wanted to show that lost memories exist everywhere, without themselves, and are connected to the present. Like a Ekaki Uta [a Japanese drawing song] I wanted to convey the image of a circle in which all memories overlap.”
In playing with the idea of inverting minimalism and the Ekaki Uta aesthetic of layering and superimposing individual parts, a palette of samples are merged and manipulated into a state of almost nonrecognition, including train station ticket gates; computer keyboards; airport runways; a brass band practising in a schoolyard; and many other fragments of everyday life that are closely associated with his personal memories.
Performed on piano, strings, clarinet, flute, voice and electronics, vibrations of everyday life are intertwined in the music with intimate field recordings, filmic strings and electronica running the gamut from gentle to muscular. The result is a cocktail of sound that illustrates lost memories, unforgotten events and footage from mental archives interpreted through audio. It’s a glittering whirlwind of late-night jazz; etchings of love songs; and dedications to life, organically interlaced with the deft use of vintage equipment, slow-dripped through a filter of cosmopolitanism sensibilities.
Having founded the internationally renowned FLAU record label in Japan in 2006, Fukuzono has gained worldwide attention as aus, through his skillful and delicate sound production, exquisitely combining cinematic strings and electronics with sounds from everyday life. With a passion for rediscovering and reinventing the very nature of sounds around him, inspiration is acquired from all corners of his mind: captured movie images; stumbled upon words or conversations; nomadic dreams; long lost memories; and indefinable inner feelings.
Owing as much to introspection as it does to exploring organic sounds from the wider, external world, aus took inspiration from the groundbreaking Japanese radio station St Giga which he enjoyed listening to as a child. Being exposed to this continual chatless mix of high quality field recordings, jazz, new age and pop music from around the globe meant that he could draw on these internal aural memories and combine them with the gorgeously enduring melodies for which he is known.