Ironomi - Sketch

ironomi’s delicate eld recordings capture the tangible atmosphere of a specic time and place. “sketch” was recorded in the summer
of 2007 in an old wooden house atop a hill in Mashiko, a town in Japan’s Tochigi prefecture known for its close association with some
of the country’s leading ceramic artists and pioneers of the mingei (folk art and craft) movement, such as Shoji Hamada. By
straddling both ambient classical music and documentary recording, ironomi created a “folk craft” album of their own – a pastoral
reverie inspired by Mashiko’s shaded bowers and itting dragonies.
“sketch” attempts to conjure something of the glaring light and torpid air of a Japanese summer using sound alone. The titles of these
compositions invoke a literal kind of emotional color – specic nuances associated with the unique hue of summer insects, or the
underside of leaves in the shade. The names of these colors belong to a romantic, anachronistic vocabulary found in literary works
that date from the Heian period (794-1185), like Sei Shonagon’s The Pillow Book.
Junya Yanagidaira’s sparkling piano arpeggios – looping insistently on top of themselves, reverberating gently against the ambient
whirr and hiss of the frolicking cicadas – evoke the drowsy languor of a midsummer afternoon, of being held captive to a riot of insects
nesting in the thick clumps of foliage on the trees outside. Indoors, you languish in a sort of blissful daze, enjoying the occasional
moment of cool relief brought inside by an errant breeze. Using real-time sampling and processing through self-made patches on his
laptop, Yu Isobe transforms Yanagidaira’s uttering phrases into something altogether darker on “uraha-iro” – a sinister pastoral
drone that simmers ominously against the inescapable clamor of the chattering insects. In their own words, “sketch” is a sonic portrait
of “a summer’s whispers” – a poetic, meditative soundtrack that records microscopic nuances of the atmospheric elements particular
to this season.

ironomi is Junya Yanagidaira (Piano) and Yu Isobe (Laptop, Guitar). “iro-no-mi” means essence
of color in Japanese. “sketch” marks their highly anticipated rst release outside of Japan after 5
acclaimed albums including the WWF (World Wildlife Fund) commissioned album “Stories of
the Artic” and “ubusuna” (No.1 album on Tower Records Japan Ambient/ Electronic chart).

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