ma ta ta bi - monochrome scenery

 Around 2015, I discovered this album on the Digging Stopped blogger's Best Albums of 2014. 

It's been a while since I thought I should write something about this album, and now I'm finally getting around to it.

 In order to write something, I need to listen to it but it's hard album to listen to once from start to finish, so it's been much later than I expected.

It's an hour long, and it takes a lot of energy to listen to it from start to finish. Some people compared writing to mountain climbing in the sense that it's an energy-consuming activity, and I think it's the same with listening to music.

Listening to music may seem like someone is just doing nothing and relaxing, but there are some songs that take a lot of energy to listen to.

Yesterday I listened to it while sitting on the steps of Times Square, and today I listened to it while lying in bed.

I tried closing my eyes and focusing on the music, but it was hard to concentrate, so I kept fiddling with my phone and couldn't let go of the visual stimulation. I'm afraid to enter this world of sound.

Of course, there's a practical problems with other daily life busyness, but even apart from that, there seems to be a certain barrier to act of entering this album.

In terms of color, this album is a completely achromatic landscape. But reality is made up of colors. Reality is a color image. But there is no sense of color in this album. It depicts a landscape that is far from everyday life.

For an hour, they paint a realm that is extremely far away from the images of living, moving things in reality.

I don't know why it's so hard to enter the world of monochrome in this album after living in the world of everyday color.

Whenever I take an elevator, I often feel the fear of falling, and this album represents that extremely extraordinary realm, as if the elevator is falling.

Can there be color in the landscape of a falling elevator?

The unexpected falling of an elevator that has always worked well, the sudden collapse of a roadside bridge that you have always walked on without thinking... The event can exist, but they are more like scenery that happen with extremely rare probability.

Would I call this experimental music? I don't think I would have any problem with this album being categorized as shamanic rather than experimental.

In the sense of spirit, though the music style is different from traditional Korean shamanic music. 

Aki Onda also said in his article that he doesn't consider himself as an experimental music creator.

The songs are all connected, so it doesn't mean much to say something about individual tracks, but the first track, ta bi no ha zi ma ri, was particularly scary. It felt like it kept tapping into some area of my psyche that I ordinarily avoid. 

There's a percussive sound, like tapping on a washboard, but with an incredibly regular beat. Tapping. Thump. Tap. Tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk, but it's extremely rare sound that I hear that in my day-to-day life. 

Listening to such music is not so much an escape into a fictional world as it is an act of clearly recognizing an alien reality that clearly exists but is easy to avoid.

Music can be traumatizing. And it can be an act of mental cleansing to confront trauma.

Other tracks feature instruments that are not saxophones but sound similar to them (a wind instrument called the analopos, developed by Akio Suzuki himself), percussion (an instrument called de koolmees, also developed by Akio Suzuki himself), stones, wood chips, nails, and hammers.

If Aki Onda's solo albums are dominated by the scratching of tape loops, this album seems to be dominated by Akio Suzuki's anaropes and percussion.

Where Akio Suzuki's solo album is boring in terms of texture, Aki Onda's tape loops make up for it.

Not all collaborative albums have good synergy (a prime example is Tim Hacker & Aidan Baker's collaborative album, which is worse than their respective solo albums),

this album doesn't diminish either of their strengths at all, but rather creates a new kind of harmonious strangeness.