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Yesterday at Shukuba 21, hiiragi_ing’s set felt like it was defined by one decision: no computer. Not as a “limitation” gimmick, but as a clear direction—everything is getting simpler, sharper, more distilled. In the afternoon air, it genuinely felt like this is where it’s heading from here on out.
The venue was Enyado in Kambara, Shizuoka—an old soy-sauce brewery warehouse (former Yamaroku Sauce / Shida Residence). The room has a deep, beautiful tail of reverb; sound can bloom just by existing there. But this time the output was strictly mono. Instead of “showing” width in stereo, the sound was sunk into the center, and the space was built through depth and layers—front-to-back. Paradoxically, less information created more density, and that reversal stayed consistent from start to finish.
The core was a Roland MP600 as the hub for routing and gain discipline, paired with a Roland SRE-555 for the real work: playing time itself. The SRE-555 wasn’t used only as a standard tape echo—there were moments of physical intervention too, like blocking the tape head with a card to force loop-like behavior. That’s when the delay stops being “repeats” and becomes an instrument. The returned sound isn’t just ambience; it feels like something being kept alive, fed, and steered. The loop heats up, approaches saturation, nearly tips into overload—and yet it doesn’t collapse. It hovers.
And that hovering was the real pleasure: floating right on the edge of failure. Not only in pitch stability, but in headroom—how far the system can be pushed before it becomes an accident. It wasn’t about flirting with disaster for show; it was about staying inside that razor-thin margin, making the border itself musical. The tension lands as pleasure, not fear.
Lofi, noise, environmental music, mixing-dub, ambient—still unmistakably music. Core. One step further and it would’ve been a crash, but that line was held and enjoyed.
By reducing the rig, removing the computer, and committing to mono, every small hand movement translated directly into expression. No wide-screen tricks—just layers of time, the temperature of the feedback, the edge of saturation, and the angle at which “memory” returns. For Shukuba as a place, it felt like the shortest possible answer.
#Shukuba #Shukuba21 #hiiragi_ing #LiveReport #LiveArchive #Ambient #IDM #Electronica #ExperimentalMusic #SoundArt #LiveElectronics #TapeEcho #LoopMusic #DubTechno #Noise #Soundscape #ImprovisedMusic #Shizuoka