Boundless solar oscillations in exquisite cycle; this new record from Miki Yui is as playful as it is mesmerizing.
Cuspeditions warmly welcomes Japanese artist Miki Yui to the label, with a work delicately crafted from field recordings, synthesizer, solar oscillator and sampler. Yui is known for the unique nature of her music (apparent also in past collaborations with Rolf Julius, Rie Nakajima and Klaus Dinger), and whilst Mills retains the subtlety and sensuousness of her earlier works, these new coherent and lucid compositions are charged with a narrative tension we’ve not heard before.
Dial Sun opens the album as an early morning call. Sounds flicker and flop, not a care in the world, amidst scraping and intimate electronics, escalating toward a frenzied outro.
The subdued unwind of Granite follows on in a laminose exploration of metallic samples upon fragmented melody, fleeting and windswept as a lost memory. The hollow-sounding language of sputtering synthesizer and warped samples creates a rhythmic strangeness in the album’s shortest piece, Salute.
Otherworldly overtones with a cooler feel characterize Mica where long elegant feedback slides between dissonant swells, thick and granular as though emerging from electronic canyons.
Solareo is the album’s major work at 13 minutes long, and invites the listener to meander through dense almost reggae like chord-beds, slow pulses and a raucous of bizarre synthetic glitches.
The cyclic reprise of Dial Moon returns to the playfulness of the opening track with dancing rhythms and turbulent hooks. Tones like whispers fade into quietude, toward a silence warm and balsam.
Miki Yui’s harnessing of solar energy, both materially and symbolically, feels like a joyous salute to the sun in all its manifestations. We couldn’t be happier releasing it into the spring!
music by miki yui 2016 – 2017
mastering by rashad becker
front cover : hebarium from kenya by stefan schneider
Born 1971 in Tokyo. Artist, composer, musician based in Düsseldorf since 1994. Multi-disciplinary artist, crossing the boundary of music, performance, drawing, and installation. She investigates the grey zone of our perception, between the reality – imaginary.
Recently, the field of her work deals with environmental issues. Since 2019 though Flux Project, in collaboration with Nathalia Favaro, they create occasionally a space to reconnect with the environment as well as with ourselves.
Parallel to her own work, she worked with Klaus Dinger (NEU! La Düsseldorf) from 2000. Since 2008, she takes care of Klaus Dinger Archive. Collaboration with Rolf Julius since 2004, with Carl Stone as Realistic Monk since 2015 and with Asmus Tietchens in 2021.
"Miki Yui´s creations emulate nature´s own structures, and they go well beyond trying, they succeed where others fail. Her music is not a river, in fact it overflows in all directions imaginable, and it seems like the sounds and their interaction describe a kind of natural evolution. It´s like watching a web woven in time-lapse, or mashroom or butterfly. Instead of the camera or the microscope it´s the microphone capturing the proceedings from close-up. Thus we experience the energy and life itself, unbridled and unrelenting.”—Detlef Weinrich, Tolouse Lowtrax*
"Starting from a perception of the faintest sounds and noises, Miki Yui develops pieces of music, drawings and sound installations that are subtle references to existents.“ — Erich Franz*
