Kozo INADA – “J[]”

Kozo Inada is a japanese sound artist who has previously released records on various labels around the world (Staalplaat, Selektion, Digital Narcis, V2). His last record published is a collaborative work with Philip Samartzis on the australian label Room40.
His music is a balance between austere minimalism and immense spaces in sound that creates a very strong tension and keeps the listener captivated from the beginning to the end.
For J[], he uses samples and loops of classical music as sound materials for Max/Msp treatments. The result is a densely layered and strong sound work, with slow rises and falls, hypnotic loops and some ruptures that give texture to silence. A sonic journey into aerial and hypnotic universes.

« Inada’s music sucks you really into it when played loud, it hardly leaves you anything other to do. It’s sound that really locks you in.» (Vital weekly)
Moving away from the field recordings which Inada used in his previous releases, for this release he concentrates solely on classical music samples and loops. At first that sounded a bit cheap to me, clearly since they are not too difficult to recognize. Inada produces perfect loops that don’t skip or anything, but make a sustaining wave of sound. In each of the five pieces things move slowly but steadily and Inada continues his working methods: from soft to loud, although it seems to me this time on a less radical level than before. It’s again quite a powerful work, and opening up new worlds to explore for Inada. It would be great to see more of his work being available. (FdW – Vital Weekly 566)