Substrate / The Garden

Dragon’s Eye Recordings is pleased to announce the re-release of 'Substrate / The Garden' by Japanese sound artist and composer Yui Onodera. 'Substrate' and 'The Garden' (Le Jardin) were originally released in 2007 by Mystery Sea and Taâlem, and after their 2018 remastering, return alongside each other eleven years later. On 'Substrate', Onodera interrogates the fundamental limits of perception. Throughout the eight tracks, shimmering frequencies pan through organic tonal structures and streams of resonance swell and ascend in a gradually expanding space of audition. While Substrate accentuates the poeticism of the microsound genre, the album progressively draws a listener toward awareness of the physical subtleties of their own surroundings. 'The Garden' is a rich, blooming composition built around the sound emitted by hydrogen and oxygen bubbles as captured by the ELS 19, a custom transmitter device which utilizes the electrolysis of water. The irregular sounds generated by this process are micro-acoustic phenomena which can only occur in a particular environment, and sit well beyond the range of unaided human hearing. As such, Onodera considers the relationship to sound and listening outside of a musicological hierarchy that might position environmental sound and music as independent and opposite concepts. Instead, Onodera regards these sensory experiences akin to that of a garden, with instrumental composition and environmental ambience each offering a total, continuous experience with innumerable interdependent relationships. The boundary between nature and artificiality becomes ambiguous.