Last Afternoon

The second release on Constructive (sister label of SN Variations) is Last Afternoon by Japanese composer Takuma Watanabe. Having studied at Berklee College in the USA he is currently living in Japan where he composes for film using a string ensemble founded by himself. This is Watanabe's first full length artist album.

Last Afternoon features collaborations with American vocalist and composer Joan La Barbara known for her recorded works with John Cage, Morton Feldman, Robert Ashley and composer and software developer Akira Rabelais known for his collaborations with Bjork and David Sylvian. The album is mastered by Jim O'Rourke. Cover photo courtesy of Swedish photographer and cinematographer Anders Edström.

Experimentation is at the heart of Takuma's film music utilising processes through software that feeds back an interaction of images and sound into the pieces. In 2015 he founded a string quartet with a number of Japanese players and he continues to compose by mixing scored music with computer generated sound in which each quartet player's performance and an effect processor react to each other. He also created the animation music videos for the two tracks Tactile and Last Afternoon creating a unique imaginary visual counterpoint to the music.

"These works are all related to spatial imagined images. There's like an old hidden castle by a rainforest or a decaying lab in the desert, where I can think and sleep. Sometimes a peculiar sense of time derived from literature is superimposed to negate or add to the space. Prior to composing, I'm reading repeatedly Anna Kavan, Borges, James Tiptree Jr., Kafka, Samuel R Delany and Artaud. I then create imagined or received images through animation and use them as a paranormal blueprint to compose from"

"Currently, I'm interested in how the sounds are perceived when I take away the historical context of how they are written and created. I make the playing between the computer and the performed score indivisible and induce mutual interference between them to generate a slight uncertainty in the source of the sounds. It's also a meditative way to observe the sound while keeping a certain distance from my compositions." -Takuma Watanabe