The "Thinness" of a Space
At the beginning of the 1970s, having majored in electronic music at university, I worked in the recording studio nearly every day from morning to night. Electronic music studios at the time, like the spaceship control rooms in science fiction movies of the 50s and 60s, had rows of- machines with a bunch of dials on them, tape recorders lining the walls and a control mixer in the center of the room. This was surrounded with speakers about the size of large refrigerators. The studio door was a heavy, soundproofed thing with an additional door inside. Because of this, inside the studio, outside noises, to say nothing of light, were completely shut out.
To create electronic music, sounds were combined and processed and structured on a temporal axis and finally, after giving some thought to the positioning of the speakers, the sound was structured spatially. In other words, the electronic music production process involved the intersection and unification of "time" and "space." In using a tape recorder to move from one sound to the next, time, by altering the length of the tape and space, and space, according to where a physical object, the speaker, was positioned, became important parts in the act of composition.
When you immerse yourself for the entire day in this kind of virtual world created by the "time" of the tape length on the recorder and the "space" of the number of speakers and the place, you start to think that this acoustic space will at some point become an actual entity. But in an instant, this "real world" was repeatedly extinguished. Because the whole university didn't have a surplus of electricity, when someone used equipment in another facility, the main power source would sometimes be overloaded, causing us to suffer blackouts on a number of occasions. Naturally, this would happen without warning. When you are hit by a blackout in a recording studio, you are instantaneously plunged into a world of silence and total darkness. First of all, the moment light and sound disappear, the memories that you had up until that point are erased. And, you don't have the slightest idea where you are in the studio or which direction you are facing. It is a terribly frightening situation. You don't even know which direction you should walk in to get to the exit. You might be standing with your nose against a mountain of steel machines. The "memory" of the world that you were certain "existed" until then simply vanishes when you can no longer see or hear.
In the 80s, I stopped producing solely electronic music. Instead, I started doing work that gave prominence to memory through the physical encounters between objects and space. But lately, I have come to remember the "thinness" of the instantly disappearing electronic space with fondness.
This text was originally published in "Art Labyrinth II: The Memory Of Time," Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art, February l997, p. 68.
Translated by Christopher Stephens
Fujimoto Yukio – text from a catalog "by f about f", Otani Memorial Art Museum, Nishinomiya City
"by f about f" was produced for "audio picnic at the museum 6/10", which was held at Otani Memorial Art Museum, Nishinomiya City on June 22, 2002.
