Enter Shintaro Matsuo’s Delicate Reality – AdHoc

Enter Shintaro Matsuo’s Delicate Reality

A lot can happen in 20 minutes and 52 seconds. It’s funny, then, that on Shintaro Matsuo’s latest 20-minute-and-52-second-release 20:52, very little seems to transpire. Across the 17 stems that quiver along the gossamer dough of the record’s surface, Matsuo’s burbles unwind and revert, never quite attaining a form or pattern. It’s a process of ambient becomings through which Matsuo’s fickle melodies trickle, tickling like a presence just before contact, like the air right above a follicle at the end of a goose bump. Glassine shards drift, encased in a sonic orbit whose perihelion teases a touching-down but whose eccentricity imbalances and collapses the approach. And it’s a listen that only rewards further digressions into its whorls and helices, one that merits a grappling with metaphor and a necessitates a reconfiguration of the spacial and emotional possibilities of sound: gurling with potentialities and directionalities all nearing audial senescence, 20:52‘s negotiates the aporia of silence and catalogs brief, aleatory intonations against its suffusive logic. Matsuo nurtures this concrescence, these periphrastic excursions, into a shimmering, incantatory ptyx—but always knows when to snuff it out, quietly, deftly, spectrally.

Shintaro Matsuo’s 20:52 is out now on cacao.

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