Audio-visual artist Raimund Wong (Floating World Pictures) and unboundaried composer Suren Seneviratne (My Panda Shall Fly / Soundway) present their debut album on London's ever experimental Kit Records. Interweaving folk, ambient and free improvisation, A Record of Living Beings playfully confronts traditional instrumentation (khæn, shakuhachi, voice, taishogoto, cello) with live tape processing and esoteric '90s software.
The Arolb ensemble began life as Raimund's freeform collaborative radio show, named after Akira Kurosawa's existential epic "Record of a Living Being". Guests included Yoshino Shigihara (vocals, percussion / Yama Warashi), Maxwell Hallett (drums / The Comet is Coming), Clive Bell (shakuhachi / Jah Wobble), Dominic Kennedy (fretless bass / uh) and Francesca Ter-Berg (cello / Fran & Flora).
In 2023, the ensemble was invited to support Tengger at Cafe Oto. In rehearsals, Raimund and Suren laid the foundations for free expression, threading a narrative between instruments with magnetic tape, dub manipulation and Suren's vast collection of rare / obsolete Macintosh music software from the '90s and early 2000s. Taking cues from the cross-cultural subversion of Yellow Magic Orchestra, and Geinoh Yamashirogumi's score for "Akira" (which augmented large gamelan and choral ensembles with midi computation), A Record of Living Beings documents a borderless ensemble spinning dialogues around 'otherness' and the fracturing of cultural and personal identity.
Like the radio shows they grew from, these recordings are optimistic and convivial; a primitive quilt of real and imagined memories, voices and futures, converging to harmonise in humid space. Recommended if you like the utopic imaginations of Haruomi Hosono, Kate Bush, Carl Stone, Susumu Yokota, and Jon Hassell; or repertory film screenings, strong tea, and glimpses from moving trains.
