Stained Productions presents Takagi Masakatsu Jon Sheffield Inkblot |
Monday, October 15th, 2001 |
back to Stained Productions - back to feedback monitor
TAKAGI MASAKATSU Takagi Masakatsu is a video maker who creates music. Takagi Masakatsu is a musician who creates video. Or maybe Takagi Masakatsu is a documentary filmmaker. Whichever one you prefer, Takagi is an artist who is wholly dedicated to exposing and preserving the human experience at the start of our burgeoning new century. Bringing new meaning to the phrase “think globally, act locally,” Takagi has travelled the world collecting pieces of sound and video in which he constructs a fluid and timeless snapshot of our current human condition. Takagi employs samples of speaking children with other “real” sounds such as the weather, his own piano playing, and various recorded sounds throughout his and other people’s homes. After collecting this raw material, Takagi blends it into his laptop arrangements and manipulations to create a very new type of ambient music. Having brought his video to other japanese musician’s sound pieces over the last few years, Takagi has decided to go solo on both the audio and video end of things. The results of his first solo endeavor have been brought together on "Pia", a two CD set to be released on New York's Carpark label in mid-October. One CD comprises the melodic ambient nature of Takagi’s audio creations, while the other disc is a CD-ROM featuring 5 audio/video pieces that have been presented in various galleries and live settings throughout Japan.
JON SHEFFIELD Born on December 3rd, 1971, Jon Sheffield has lived most of his life in the American mid-west and is currently based in Columbia, Missouri. He has experimented with sound since an early age, and has developed an amazing ease for merging electronic sounds with acoustic instruments (like melodica, guitar) and wonderful voice samples that slip in between, bringing a strong emotional aspect to his work. Sheffield's first two albums, "Calves Valves" and "Shore Hoses", were released on the small Subversal label. His latest disc is the stunning "It's been so long since I've seen the ocean", a release on the German Tomlab imprint that has drawn strong and positive comparisons to the early work of Mouse On Mars and other melodic electronica greats.
INKBLOT Inkblot is Jeremy Ballard, a 22 year old Texan who incorporates highly textural and organic experimental electronic compositions with playfully bubbly beats. With more emphasis on warm melodies than most electronic artists these days, Austin's one-man future-pop deconstructuralist, melts rhythms into vaporous trails then glues them back together between bits of found sounds, self-sampled instrumentation on guitar, synthesizer, piano and more. Inkblot's debut album "The Language Game" was released last year on Tomlab, and has been described by one reviewer as "a combination of To Rococo Rot, B. Fleischmann, Mouse On Mars and Steve Reich". A second album entitled "Love Your Mother" has been completed and will be released very soon on the Audio Dregs label of Portland, Oregon. |