Double LP
Amok Age dive into the vast archives of Japanese noise veteran Fumio Kosakai for a first time vinyl release of The Warm Garden, a previously tape-only release from 1993 that helped expand understandings of the harsh sounds he was making elsewhere. Kosakai has many projects to his name, though is perhaps most known for his connections to the fabled Incapcitants. The Warm Garden persists with that same sense of sonic adventure, though is suitably more impressionistic and atmospheric than it is hostile. Broadly speaking, we're in the confines of post-industrial, noise-focused sound exploration, and a very open-ended form at that. There is something particularly ghostly and dissociative at play here, a floating miasma of near-originless eruptions and expulsions that bloom into noxious hazes before drifting off into the distance, like bad thoughts in confusing times. The metallic scrapes and sonorous expanses of the second disc are particularly redolent of Harry Bertoia's sonic sound structures, and in the sunken, haunted frequencies there's also aspects of Mark Vernon's The Dramaturgy of Decay and Werkbund at their most abstracted. Spooky business that proves you don't need maximum volume to be truly unsettling.
