• Audio
• Photos
• Posts

Lyrics

This track features sounds recorded in Hokkaido, the large northern island of Japan. We spent five days there with friends in February 2007. I recorded various sounds: boots on crunching on ice in the resort town of Sounkyo, the streets of Sapporo during its famous Snow Festival, the train we caught across the island, and the sound of wind blowing across metal bars on a pier at the port of Abashiri in the middle of a blizzard, one of the most bleak and exhilirating places I've experienced.

The most prevalent sound on the track is a faint noise I recorded coming through the ventilation duct of a hotel bathroom in Abashiri. I noticed this sound while taking a bath and promptly drained it and set up my microphone. The sound had this wonderful harmonic ringing that felt to me like the sound of the landscape we were in; the sound's faint roar somehow seeming to me the aural equivalent of the white snowscape.

This ventilation drone sound is the background onto which the other samples play and mingle. Eventually the drone falls away, and the recording I made at the Abashiri wharf plays as a kind of coda.