Musicity, Nick Luscombe’s global project inviting musical responses to architecture, announced its first solo artist album TOKYO の DENSHA (pronounced “Tokyo No Densha”) from field recordist and composer James Greer. Having been debuted recently in Tokyo at a very special Musicity live event alongside Langham Research Centre, Jim O’Rourke, and Kassel Jaeger, Musicity have released the album as a very limited cassette, housed inside a Manga-influenced sleeve design.
Following on from the Musicity release, a compilation that featured patten, Throwing Shade and Moses Boyd, TOKYO の DENSHA sees the label moving into the realm of artist albums with this excellent offering from James Greer. Dissecting field recordings made in and around the rail maps of urban and suburban Tokyo, Greer cuts up the recordings before re-sampling and ultimately recomposing them into musical responses to the environment they originally existed within. The result is an audio map of Tokyo suburbs, bars, streetcar journeys, local bathhouses, temples, the world’s shortest escalator, and much more of the spaces in between. The music changes pace from lo-fi techno to more modal excursions and walls of noise, while the ambient settings of the everyday surroundings drift throughout.
Pressed onto a one time run of 50 cassettes and implemented as two seamless, non-stop journeys, TOKYO の DENSHA offers the followers of Musicity another highly fascinating look at the city as an all-encompassing instrument.
