Koji Asano: A Secret Path Of Rain Koji Asano: A Secret Path Of Rain (Solstice - 2000) With his 15th Solstice release, Koji Asano wanders along A Secret Path Of Rain, where two long pieces of computer synthesis create juxtapositions of quiet and cacophony. Not "music", the pair of tracks are seemingly random soundscapes, or perhaps more appropriately, soundscrapes, which simply evolve in their own way, without apparent direction. Asano's photography provides an interesting visual focus with its clear-to-blurred depth-of-field. Sputtering, crackling, popping, warbling, hissing and temporarily receding between those outbursts, 21'04 is threaded with electronic oscillations of varying pitch, density and duration. Wild fibrillations etch a gritty, ever-changing mosaic of shapelessly electron-blasted patterns. The quietly noisy spurts of 27'09 are separated by longer periods of silence, sometimes with many seconds elapsing; at one point I counted more than 30 seconds of nothingness between brief explosions of white noise. Occasionally the gumblingly glitchy levels reach a more painful threshold, but more often just faintly register. Following these unpredictable caustic textures seems to me much like tracing the splotchy organic corrosion along a length of partially rusty pipe... from slightly pitted, to smooth, to crustily eaten away. To those with tender ears, A Secret Path Of Rain may seem like a direct route to pain... but for intrepid travelers of the rougher edges of sonic exploration, Koji Asano's 7.9 experiments will yield a wonderful balance of turbulence and lull. Koji's previous releases have ventured from similarly noise-based recordings (such as Momentum to the more musical, though still quite experimental piano sounds of Preparing for April or the avant chamber ensemble of Flow-Augment. This review posted August 30, 2000 AmbiEntrance © 2000-1997 by David J Opdyke (except CD cover art, rights retained by original owners).