Pauline Oliveros / Miya Masaoka Accordion / Koto
Deep Listening Institute
Review by Peter Aaron
As one of America’s most renowned modern composers and the founder of Kingston’s Deep Listening Institute, Pauline Oliveros is an artist whose vast catalog and performance resume is dependably challenging and always ready to take adventurous listeners to new and surprising places. And those sonic psychonauts will no doubt find this captivating release which, for four extended improvisations, teams Oliveros on her preferred instrument of treated accordion with New York’s Miya Masaoka on koto (13-stringed Japanese zither), to be yet another example of the rewarding output with which Oliveros is associated.
The seeds for this collaboration of offbeat instruments were planted in the summer of 2004, when Oliveros and Masaoka played together as teachers at Bard College and quickly realized there was something special going on. “It is not so much about the instruments as about the energies of the music that comes from the intensity of listening,” says Oliveros. “Listening as close to ‘now’ as possible.” And for the length of Accordion/Koto “now” is a very fine place to be, a moody realm steeped in Oliveros’s wheezing drones and electronic blips and Masaoka’s skittering scrapes and sinewy plucking. In January, Oliveros and Masaoka performed in New York in honor of the album’s release; here’s hoping they do the same in our area soon.
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