Nick Luscombe: So, first of all Carl, this is about Nakano and about Tokyo.

Nakano is kind of your neck of the woods, isn’t it?

Carl Stone: Well .. yeah Nakano is the neighbourhood I live in it’s part of Central Tokyo although its a little bit outside of the loop line the kind of periphique of Tokyo which is the yamanote trainline, but its not that far outide its about 5 minutes from shinjuku which isa major hub, and, well, its part of a big city but it also has the feeling of a village in some ways I mean, its really a neighbourhood, and its where ive been living since i moved to toyko 20 years ago. So, i mena this project as i see it, its kind of a, its a wide shot of tokyo but it zooms in and focuses to a large degree on the neighbourhood of Nakano … incorporating the sounds that I hear almost in my daily routine, shopping, walking around, barhopping … etc.

And, uh you were kind enough to follow me around, both of you and, sort of capture me capturing the sounds and the life of the city.

Nick: You know ive spent lots of time listening to your music and there are all these references to the city that you include, and to actually be in the space where maybe those dieas came from, it felt very … good, like a real peek into your world and your routie.

Carl: well, I mean, ive been, from the beginning from my very first visit to tokyo which was, gosh when i think about it calculating, almost 40 years ago, I was smitten and fascinated by the soundscape. I think it’s a very unique soundscape. You know, R Murray Schaefer has proposed that every city every locale has its own sort of sonic - not fingerprint - but sonic print if you will

Nick: yeah

CS: Tokyo certainly has that, and it's kind of my theory that well.

Most of the major metropolis’ of the world are noisy, and tokyo certainly is, but tokyo is a city where i think it has purposfully introduced noise.

Noise, coming from: announcements, from whenever you walk into a shop or a store, there’s a sound … either made by a speaker or by a human being, welcoming you to the store, when you leave theres a sound, when you press a button … anywhere there’s a sound, you know, there’s just sounds, uh, every shop has kind of a sonic signature and so … my theory is that you know, if you were to take the traffic sound out of New York, then the whole soundscape would collapse, and in a sense if you were to take all these purposefully introduced sounds away from Tokyo it would just be a much different kind of atmosphere".

James Greer: So Carl, we’ve experienced your journeys around this area via your various outputs, your musical outputs and even … on social media where you’ve got these amazing cafes, and these little backstreets that you find, so it was really special to explore that with you and trail behind a little bit, take a little bit of time to sort of play with things a bit and make some noises with them, and interact with the sounds of the space as well…

CS: And Sunday morning is a very different sound profile to say a Wednesday night or a Friday night, or something like that ...

NL: And, do you think that … what we’re gonna do now, is a kind of, is a snapshot? Because we can’t capture all the different, sound dynamics within the kind of 40 minutes or so, right?

Carl: Oh you know, I think its kind of a collage, I’ve got these sounds that we recorded at the time, I’ve got some other recordings from in and around my neighbourhood, and I’ve made other recordings throughout the entire city. My approach i think is to create – well, on one level its a collage – a kind of montage of sounds but structured in such a way that is

to move the ... sort of the, sonic camera around, and change the sort of focus and attention, and also to create a new, kind of, a new reality, a new maybe 22nd Century Tokyo,

that is something that I am sort of interested in trying to do tonight!

NL: I love that idea of kind of capturing, collaging.

Of kind of making something that is hyperreal through sound, which is really a fun thing to do … you do that a lot with your music don’t you?

CS: Well, yes, I do it a lot of times with found or appropriated music, but have a lot of pieces that integrate field recordings in. As i mentioned, I was fascinated with the sounds of Tokyo from the first time i came, and then when I came back in the late 1980s with a specific purpose, and even some financial support from the Asian Cultural council to uh, not document, but to capture the sounds of metropolitan Tokyo at that time, and to create a new piece of music – which came out as a CD called Kamiya Bar.

Also what’s interesting is that – I think this is probably true of many cities but its certainly the case with Tokyo, is that the soundscape is changing all the time. Tokyo is always renewing itself; things are constantly under construction. Old buildings, sometimes sadly, are being collapsed and destroyed and rplaced with new buildings, which may be offputting when they are erected but may become loved and appreciated and then mourned when they disappear, in 40 or 50 years in the future … and the same thing with sounds.

There is a professor here in Tokyo by the name of Keiko Toigway who has done a lot of work documenting the sounds of japan. Natural sounds, and also the urban sounds of Tokyo, and a lot of the sounds that I hear dor recorded back in 1988 theyve gone now. They’ve either disappeared or they’ve been replaced. the sounds of human beings, punching tickets at train stations has been of course replaced by automatic machines you know, automatic wickets and um, on one level I regret that the beautiful sounds of these people punching the tickets, when they’re massed up like that was incredible sound … it’s gone, but the new sounds are in their way, wonderful too, and when they disappear from some reason, in the future we’ll miss them as well.

JG: It is a special place isnt it?

CS: Yes I think it is! Though, I suppose I’m a Nakano partisan because I live there! But I think if you want to all the neighbouring stations - Koenji for example – or just went a little farther down, that would have its own profile and that would be wonderful too. It’s just, sort of, where you are, and where you become accustomed to – 

and where you end up making your recordings.

Maybe we should talk a little bit about the system that we’re doing here, because I think it’s an interesting and unusual approach that you guys have elected to do.

JG: Well there’s three people here so there’s Carl in the middle who is the master of the ceremony today, of the performance, and then Nick and me are going to be feeding in our own sounds to Carl … as we mentioned we went on a sound journey; a sound hunting journey with Carl several weeks ago and got a collection, or you might even say a hoard of sounds. We’ll be feeding those to Carl, and also some of our edits of those, and in the meantime as well of course Carl has his own material, that he’s been working on from his own recordings too.

It's all based around a long form recording that we made right in the heart of Nakano. There’s a railway bridge, so next to the station, and it felt like a really nice backbone.

NL: It’s a really nice way to describe it, it’s kind of really like a backbone.

CS: Yeah, I mean it’s kind of like

the sonic heart of central Nakano

which has defined itself by the station, and it's an overpass, that trains are running above. There’s also a major thoroughfare for automobiles down below, the Nakano street - Nakano Dori - and you’ve got the cars going back and forth from left to right if you will and you've got a train that will pass every minute or 2 up ahead.

So you’ve got this sort of X-Y and A-B across axes happening, and I think that’s kind of interesting, fundamental for the entire performance, we’re gonna use that kind of the basis, you’ll hear it at the beginning I think and then I start to add in more material and then …

NL: I thought that was kind of like, for me anyway, I just kind of realized the symphonies and the humour that are just there all the time. There’s just all these different collisions …

CS: It’s Tokyo!

NL: Yeah, it’s Tokyo! That’s what it is! It’s funny isn't it the memory of place is so powerful when you hear sounds, you're just sort of transported straight back.

CS: Oh definitely … sound is right up there with smell, and taste and everything else that brings back memories.