Beach Sloth

Yasuhiro Morinaga - Sceneries from the Castellated Wall 7.3

                Yasuhiro Morinaga’s three pieces have a tremendous sense of calm. The field recordings here are warm and friendly. A few times Yasuhiro appears to have fun with the animal sounds. You hear lambs, cows, and birds from far away. Occasionally the volume is such that it nearly jars you out of the beautiful shimmering tones. This is out of humor more than anything else. Both the well-textured drones and field recordings work to ease you into a sense of the pastoral. 

                All three pieces are decidedly rural. Few snippets exist of any city scape, or even much of humanity. We hear clips of children (in the second and third tracks) but that’s it. The first piece is almost entirely of field recordings, some machine coming from far away, very lightly treated. Only at the end does a glimmer of Yasuhiro’s handiwork break through the mellowness of the work. ‘Parade’ is the most intense of the three pieces. It remains mostly calm. Noises essentially warn the listener of the breakdown in this otherwise calm release. An actual rhythm is played over the increasing intensity of the sounds. This is as close as Yasuhiro gets to an industrial sound. In ‘Ear of Dionysius’ the track comes closest to an actual dance track. 

                This is an unusual release. I like the movement from nature into a more artificial and digital landscape as the EP progresses. At the very end we hear the treated samples of kids in an echo chamber. It is weird yet reminds us of the fun Yasuhiro clearly had putting this together.