"Generic City"
http://www.critical-path.info
http://thesingularwe.org/celer

Yui Onodera: environmental sound, electronics, guitar, violin, piano, and musical box
Danielle Baquet-Long and Will Long: mixing board, cello, violin, piano, environmental sound, theremin, electronics, and ocarina

Generic City is the debut release for Two Acorns, a new label/publisher curated by Will Long of Celer. Generic City is presented in a custom-designed CD package, created by mondii, with photography by Danielle Baquet-Long, and mastered by Taylor Deupree.

For this collaboration work, I made a lot of field recordings. Songs of migratory birds that come to a big lake only in winter, the sound of breaking ice, frozen on a lake, the peal of huge bells in a temple, voices in prayer to the Buddha, footsteps in the subway, on the ground, made by coming and going people, machine sounds at a construction site, rain flowing into a steel pipe with a hard sound, the oscillation sound of rubbing iron which was recorded through a contact mic set on steel, the conversation of people walking in the city, noise of vehicles and trucks, kids voices from an elementary school, and so on. Like a time trip to transcend places, these sound-scapes are presented as a imaginary tale. To collaborate with foreign artists became a chance for facing Japan again for me. Reflecting on each of our localities to compose let us be aware anew of the vernacular which has been lost in the global world. Artists can't be unrelated to the characteristics (culture) of places (surroundings) where they live, and they are influenced obliviously in some way. By watching our everyday surroundings closely, we can engender a most realistic language of where we live, and how we think. I sense that peculiar, unfamiliar cultures and customs are invaluable wealth in human history. - Yui Onodera

In this collaboration work with Yui Onodera, we contributed many instrument sounds, and field recordings such as the streets of Los Angeles, rain on our doorstep, water draining into the gutter, cars passing on wet and slippery streets, people walking on their way home from work, talking in an airport baggage claim, crosswalks, airliners flying over, taxi rides, riding bikes through traffic, conversations in restaurants, the Metro Link train in Los Angeles, and walking on quiet streets. In our part of mixing, since we were working with someone's instrument sounds and field recordings from a city that we haven't visited, much was left to our imagination to re-create an environment and city setting for the piece. Trying to keep a balance between the heavily processed material and the entirely unprocessed material, created a natural bridge of movement inside the city. Processed elements became backdrops and scores to real activity, sometimes simply drifting away from the daily life, or the finding the soul of the pieces. When these two entirely different cities came together, it created an all new way of looking at, and hearing the city's movements around us. Cultures parallel one another, with the views of the skylines and empty streets left the only visible evidence of similarity. - Danielle Baquet-Long, Will Long

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About the label

Founded in 2010, Two Acorns is a publisher of different types of art forms ranging from music, to books, to film, and is combined with original packaging, with a focus on sentimentality in all its forms, new and old, shelved and worn, perfect and new. These are things you can hold in your hand, or keep on your bookshelf, to keep these feelings, memories, and experiences. There is no replacement for the smell of a book, the spin of a
CD player starting, or the consistently changing nature of our memories. For Danielle Baquet-Long