hiroaki minami: obscure tape music of japan vol 19 kumo no ito

"Kumo no Ito" (trans. "The Spider's Thread): "In 1977 I started the project of a musical piece for a female narrator and 4-channel electronic sounds using the text of the well-known Akutagawa novel. I worked with a hand-made analog synthesizer which had been installed two years before in my home studio in Tokyo. Needless to say, the editing was done without digital machines. I worked with the recorded tapes together with scissors and splicing tape. It was the resonance-adding apparatus that I operated which was very important as a sound effect. The part for the synthesizer was made manually, recording the short fragments and collecting them onto one tape through several tape recorders. My studio was full of a lot of tape fragments. I think the situation in those days was stupendous but I didn't feel distress. The manual procedure was usual at that time, so I could rather enjoy the process of advancing towards the goal step by step. After the long term of manual work, I completed a 4-channel 10" tape of 7mm width which should be played 38cm per second. The original novel Kumo no Ito was translated into several languages. I have worked with the text narrations in German, French and Italian etc., but now I have only the German version recording." --Hiroaki Minami (Reading: Setsuko Kawauchi).