Tower of Winds - Review

Architectural Review, The, August, 1999 by John L. Walters

By Savvas Ysatis and Taylor Deupree

Computer technology, coupled with low CD manufacturing costs, has made it absurdly easy to create recorded music: you can make an electronic dance disc or an avant-garde one - as easily (and as artlessly) as erecting a prefabricated shed. Away from the troublesome business of dealing with musicians and acoustic space, sound timbre can be collaged, manipulated and looped within the environment of a PC without leaving home.

There is an analogy here with the non-representational visual arts of the early twentieth century. Sound artists, if they don't mind remaining within the acoustic frame provided by electronic loudspeakers, can deal directly with the timbre, the material essence of music. Computers provide the tools for sophisticated sound sculpture.

The three CDs released to date in Caipirinha Music's Architettura series are intended to represent celebrated buildings of the past decade and a half. In volume one, repetitive electronic scribbles and asthmatic soundscapes by Savvas Ysatis and graphic designer Taylor Deupree are paired with Toyo Ito's Tower of Winds in Yokohama. Volume two features scratchy, distorted sounds by composer Tetsu Inoue, who apparently scanned more than 1000 photographs of Nicholas Grimshaw's Waterloo Terminal to generate the raw sound materials for his sound collage. For volume three, Itsuko Hasegawa's Museum of Fruit, musician-writer David Toop assembles and layers sounds from his arsenal of acoustic and electronic instruments - keyboards, flutes, guitars, percussion: some recorded live in the troublesome acoustics of the Purcell Room - a stone's throw from Grimshaw's terminal. Though Toop's books and compilation albums can be warmly recommended, this abstract sequence of drips and pulses cannot. Nevertheless, it is the most listenable of the three.

There is much to say about the relationship between architecture and music, about structure, function, aesthetics, technology and many other factors that inform both disciplines. I'm afraid these three CDs contribute nothing to the discussion. While the buildings pictured are big structures, with a public or social dimension, the music is small-scale and sketchy perhaps overly concerned with the 'appearance' of architecture rather than its essence. Caipirinha's CDs may be cleverly marketed, with tactile packaging and liner notes that push the 'correct' cultural buttons, but their content is mediocre, the sonic equivalent of a couple of sheds.

JOHN L. WALTERS