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Noumenal Eggs

by MIRA新伝統

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Chronosis 03:05
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about

The post-human reality isn’t all glistening dystopias and cyberpunk fantasies. It’s walking empty Shibuya backstreets with neon lights advertising to nobody, or molten plastic-sediment stones littering the shoreline at a Kanagawa eco-trance rave. These are some of the scenes that inspired Tokyo-based duo MIRA新伝統’s latest EP release, Noumenal Eggs —a probing, contorted excavation of sonic composites consisting complex dissonance and rich, evolving textures.

Honami Higuchi and Raphael Leray’s latest release follows 2019’s Torque, which was a harrowing 20-minute short film and soundtrack marking the physical and psychological effects of sexual abuse and trauma. The piece was adapted from an hour-long performance that combined Japanese choreographer Honami’s confronting enactments of rape and her experience of sex work, alongside French expat producer Leray’s haunting ambient compositions. Together the piece mapped out the violence and subsequent disidentification the artist endured, while trying to cope with the drive of an industry at odds with her own humanity.

While the Torque project supported Honami in healing from the injuries of the past and the severe depressive episodes of the present, Noumenal Eggs carries these distressing themes of Otherness and the body as merely a resource in a consumer economy towards the broader context of the post-Capitalocene. Deleuze and Guattari’s “desiring machines” resonate through the serpentine rumble of Leray’s lurching, fractured sound on “Howling Machines”. Honami’s guttural shrieks reverberate with the alienation of pandemic-era visits to bankrupt commercial buildings in “Hosting of Inorganic Demon”. That track draws on the weird and eerie world of Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani’s theory-fiction, where sentient geographical regions and demonic natural resources are their own autonomous entities.

Using mostly FM and wavetable synthesis, the crackle and clatter of “Chronosis” emulates the feeling and fracture of time folding and space compressing like its own reverb, in what MIRA新伝統 calls “a muffled and backward spatial sensation”. Musical counterparts include the hard and fractured compositions of Ziúr, who contributes a remix of “Disembodiment” to the EP. Then there’s the influence of SOPHIE’s tactile textures and gendered vocal play—Leray sings the high notes on the aforementioned track, and Honami does the low and gurgling ones everywhere else. Coil, Psychic TV, Markus Popp and no wave icon Ikue Mori all leave their subtle marks on the gritty contingency of the release’s post-industrial noise.

The Noumenal Eggs cover image comes from Swiss artist Maya Hottarek, photographed by Joelle Neuenschwander. An alien-green sculpture, slick with an oily glaze, resonates with an object that exists outside of human perception. Its unfamiliar form suggests alternative futures and a new nature beyond the imagination, as defined by the late-k-punk cultural theorist Mark Fisher: “we must produce something that doesn’t yet exist and about which we cannot know how and what it will be.”

credits

released June 17, 2022

All tracks written and produced by Honami Higuchi and Raphael Leray; mixed and mastered by James Ginzburg.

Published by Multiverse Media Publishing
© & ℗ Subtext / Multiverse LTD 2022

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MIRA新伝統 Tokyo, Japan

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