Reviews

African PaperWith "Repeating Town," Nonturn will release his new digital album on August 22nd via Audiobulb. Behind the project by Tokyo-based composer Nozom Yoneda lies a fascinating concept: all the album's sounds originate from field recordings in Tokyo's Koenji district, a trendy nightlife area that is actually part of the more affluent Suginami ward, but already hints at its proximity to Shinyuku. The sounds range from traffic lights, footsteps, and construction sites to air conditioners, passing cars, and snippets of conversation. No instruments are used.

“Repeating Town,” however, is explicitly not intended as a documentary journey through an unprocessed sonic “reality.” Instead, the recordings are deconstructed, looped, layered, and reorganized on a constant pulse of 96 BPM. This creates music that moves between musique concrète, microsound, and an electronic soundscape beyond the club scene, transforming the city itself into an instrument. Fittingly, the artwork and photographs are also by the artist. Close-up shots of weathered facades, walls, and layers of paint from the area reflect the same idea as the music: the city serves not as a motif, but as material. The project is complemented by specially developed videos (see Bandcamp) in which the original film footage of the field recordings is reassembled according to the musical structure.

Original > HERE

Musique MachineLife is full of repeating patterns and cycles, be they from the Earth and Moon, our natural beings, or those we create in our day-to-day. Extend this out, and one can see a city come to life, following its own patterns and cycles, built upon thousands (or more) simultaneously running and moving cycles of its denizens. Nonturn takes these repetitive city cycles, repurposes their sounds, and structures them into a new, 96 BPM cycle for Repeating Town. Capturing the machines, footsteps, sounds, and rhythms of Koenji, Tokyo, Nonturn builds an intriguing new city life via experimental electronic music. Rearranging the recorded sounds to form something musical from nothing, this dada-esque reconstruction makes art from the repetitive chaos of the city routine

Spread over seven tracks, the 96 BPM grid connects each piece like the cycles and patterns repeated each day by the denizens and district of Koenji. This grid, though, is just a reference point for the cycles, and the BPM listing may make one think this is dance music in some way. One would better liken it to a pulse, a heartbeat that makes the city tick, each beat another contraction moving the traffic forward. This interconnectedness helps keep Repeating Town cohesive as well as furthering the motif, not to mention giving the album a pulse and life of its own. WIth as much field recording as Repeating Town contains, Nonturn keeps it from sounding mundane and like a street recording with a beat. Lids slam, cars rush past, machines hum, but even the discernible city noises get new life on this album. The pacing keeps the album moving, as is the point of the project, but remains aloof enough to allow the sounds and loops to remain at the forefront, not the grid itself. Coming from the speakers, the sounds display a new look at Koenji, a secret view greater than the sum of the parts. Knowing how the album was made helps the listener to contextualise it in this way, but if one were to listen fresh, they'd find a very engaging electronic album that teases at EDM while dragging its dress through ambient puddles. Like the din of the city routine, one makes of it what one will, and each experience will be different.

Nonturn's Repeating Town takes an interesting approach to capturing the mundane cycles of city life and transforming them into something different and beautiful. Keeping the repetitive, cyclical nature with each piece, the album moves from track to track as one would go about their own day, becoming a being of its own. Repeating Town is full of engaging layers and loops, and like the cycles it is based upon, when the album ends, one will hit play and start it all over again.

Original > HERE

Monolith CocktailUnderlying this often pleasant and understated rhythm of the concrete is the idea of “how the city can be made to function as music”. Beats and loops created from the environment and resonance of Tokyo’s famous “bohemian” neighbourhood of Koenji are repeated, layered and placed on a 96 BPM grid and used as the basis of sampled material, with the results being a most ambient and minimal soundtrack of kinetics, soft industrials, reverberations and the tubular.

The alias of Kanazawa-born and Tokyo-based electronic composer Nozom Yoneda, the Nonturn project utilizes everything from the tools of construction to the traffic and architecture of a well-known musical underground (especially punk rock it’s said) and retail district in the Western regions of that metropolis. And all of it without the use of instruments, nor the obvious or familiar sounds of a buzzing city; transformed from their sources into a low rhythm and groove and set of looped or sampled sonics and ambience.

Every track is interesting in its style and mode of rhythm; from cupping sounds to the ringing of metallic reverberations, swept motions, scaffold and the warbled oscillations and vibrations and the pneumatic drills of machines. With some exceptions it makes for a softened post club absorption of Boards of Canada, Kriedler, Japanese Environmental music, and the early Warp label.

Those exceptions however, can be found in the form of the camera-like shutter snaps hollowed-out tubed captures of ‘Fathom’, and on the psychogeography of the industrial and more supernatural sounding ‘Disrupt’ – I’m convinced that the spirits of the district’s original temples, of which it is named after, are invoked through the mystical and spirit sounds that prick the metallurgy of the slab concreted exteriors; something seeping through from the back alleys in which the old has been hidden and rebuilt. The peeling of layers, of the daily actions and converse of a city district come alive through attentive and subtle uses of sampling and the transduced to create a most immersive sound world that grooves and rhythmically finds a connection with the concrete.

Original > HERE

Anxious MagazineThe city is rarely, if ever, silent. Its surface is in motion—signals, footsteps, fans, cars, distant voices, construction. We usually hear them as background noise, a meaningless hum. Nonturn does the opposite, stripping these sounds of their documentary function and examining what happens when they are treated as musical material.

Repeating Town was created entirely from field recordings made in Koenji, Tokyo. There are no traditional instruments. Chopped samples are subordinated to a 96 BPM rhythmic grid, repeating, overlapping, and colliding. Footsteps become percussion, a mechanical hum becomes texture, a random click becomes accent. It's not the city that illustrates the music. It's the city that's forced to play it, and it sounds like the finest orchestra.

What's most interesting is how quickly the recordings lose their original meaning. While a single sound can still be recognized as a fragment of the street environment, when combined with subsequent samples, it begins to fulfill a purely musical function. Footsteps, signals, and the operation of devices are reduced to rhythm, a brief accent, or a repetitive texture. Nonturn, therefore, doesn't attempt to recreate a specific location, but rather utilizes its characteristic, recurring elements to create its own structure. 

Repeating Town doesn't tell the story of any specific location, though it uses only one—Tokyo. In these recordings, the city loses its obviousness, as if someone had erased its geographical coordinates. Over time, the origins of individual sounds cease to matter. How they function within the new structure becomes more important. It's a bit like looking at a section of wall taken out of context; suddenly, it no longer resembles architecture, but an abstract shape. Nothing here is invented, yet everything changes function. 

"Repeating Town" has a touch of musique concrète infused with the experience of club music. The steady tempo gives the whole thing a "danceable impulse," but instead of synthetic sounds, the materiality of everyday life emerges. This isn't a simple attempt to "make a beat" from street sounds. Nonturn is more interested in the moment when sound ceases to be information and becomes a physical event. Then, the hum of an air conditioner can have the weight of a bass, a transition signal the function of a hi-hat, and a random conversation becomes an almost abstract murmur.

It's here that the album comes closest to post-club thinking. Rhythm isn't solely used to organize time, but allows for the perception of regularity where chaos seems to reign. 96 BPM becomes a kind of scaffolding on which Nonturn suspends fragments of reality. Repetition, however, doesn't mean monotony. On the contrary, subtle shifts, sample overlaps, and variations in length keep the structure in constant, almost organic motion.

Repeating Town isn't a classic field recording album. It's more like an attempt to find musical logic in what usually slips under the radar. Nonturn records the city, but makes it repeat its own gestures like a rhythm. And when, after listening, we return to our own street—to the signals, footsteps, the monotonous hum of machines—it's hard not to notice that similar music is already there. We simply don't have the time to truly hear it in our daily lives. 

Original > HERE