yasunao tone & hecker – palimpsest (mego)

yasunao tone, born in 1932 in tokyo and is a founder of the group ongaku (music) in 1960, a group devoted to creating “event music”. he began participating in the fluxus movement in 1962. at the time, he was also composing experimental music for films, theater and dance performances. florian hecker, born in 1975 has been working with computer music alone and together with some other artists from the contemporary experimental music scene such as: russell haswell, peter rehberg, marcus schmickler, yosunao tone since 1996. his sound is completely digital dealing with hardware and software; eventually in this new collaboration album he applies the same. as we can see from their dates of birth this collaboration involves a huge generation difference. but that doesn’t present an obstacle for their collaboration. merging the experimenting with sound in the past and experimenting with the new technologies is what we have here. the sound on this release is completely digital and it sound like that. hard, metal glitch cut ups appear here and there, interweaving into one another. harsh noise, pure synthetic glitch, squeaking, buzzing… are variously pitched, speeded up and slowed down. the whole release containing four songs is pure, dry and clean glitch cut up. the name of the release is ‘palimpsest’ that is derived from latin plimpsestus or greek palimpsestos, meaning writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after having erased the writing or something that has usually diverse layers (aspects) apparent beneath its surface. so this ‘palimpsest’ transformed into sound is showing all its attributes. here you can hear the older writings, something erased and something new.