On Air - On Site : 48 Hours of Radio Art

Aired on May 25th 08:00 CEST 2024
ASAKUSA
Genre: Soundscape Composition
Duration: 30 min
“Asakusa” is a response to my first visit to Japan in February of 2023, staying in the Asakusa neighborhood of Tokyo, with its river and elevated highway and frenetically busy temple. I don’t know why I chose Asakusa for my first visit, but then again, why not? Knowing nothing about the layout of Tokyo, it made as much sense as anything for a place to start. The piece is composed first from field recordings from the area, arranged to form a narrative structure, then layered with acoustic/electric guitar and noise from a Landscape Stereo Fields device. Given that the base layer of field recordings is in discrete movements, the more conventionally musical elements follow this, making the piece more a suite of short chapters that form a whole than a single, durational piece, as I’m more typically prone toward. It captures, I think, some of the chilly brightness of late winter in that part of the city, heard through the naiveté of an enthusiastic, if somewhat exhausted, first-time visitor.

Featuring:

Brian Short

Brian C. Short is an author, musician, and former filmmaker who currently lives between the US Pacific Northwest and Chiang Mai, Thailand. His ongoing musical project Numinosum Radio exists as a podcast and radio show updated with original new material every two weeks, the former now at Substack (briancshort.substack.com) and latter at CAMP Radio (https://listen.camp/#shows). His books include the novel New People of the Flat Earth (Repeater Books, 2018), a memoir The Seventh Dead: The UFO and The Underworld (Numinosum Books, 2022), and the upcoming memoir Eating Gods: Encounters with The Vine of The Dead. He is also at work on an interrelated series of literary science fiction novels.

Brian studied experimental music at The Institute of Sonology, One Year Course in 2018-19, and was easily the oldest student at the time. He has previously worked at too many jobs in too many fields to list coherently, so no longer tries. He likes small, furry creatures as well as large, wrinkled creatures with or without fur. He likes you. He thinks you are very nice.