麻布 diaries // tom soloveitzik
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七 [南麻布]
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Minato music salon room #5?
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八 [南麻布]
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[蔵王温泉] thousand eyes
Tom Soloveitzik: tenor saxophone, recordings.
All recordings were made by Tom Soloveitzik between November 2022 and December 2023 in Tokyo & Zao Onsen, Japan.
Mastered by Taku Unami, October 2024.
麻布 diaries is intended to be read and pronounced in English as Azabu diaries (Azabu is a neighborhood in Tokyo). However, as Sun Yizhou kindly pointed out, the term has a different meaning in Chinese, translating to 'linen.' Ultimately, the interpretation is left to the listener's discretion.
Alone-011 is a solo album by Tom Soloveitzik. He works with the materiality of sound, the practice of listening, and the potentiality of recording [a ‘field’] through performance and writing.
'麻布 diaries' recorded while Tom was living in Japan, most of the sounds come from his practice at home. The sound is quiet, subdued, intriguing and full of detail. On track 2, if you listen closely, you can hear the clarinetist practicing in another room as Tom taps his thumb on the reed, which he describes himself as an invisible metronome. Last track is a field recording from Zao onsen (2023, a ski resort north of Fukushima. Tom placed the recorder inside the saxophone to record. If the track 2 is amplifying the room/space with the use of the saxophone as an object the track from Zao onsen listens to the saxophone as an historic and social phenomena, from the outside.
releases December 20, 2024
Reviews:
Dancing About Architecture - Jinhyung Kim 1.2.2025
tom soloveitzik - 麻布 diaries (Aloe Records, Dec 20)
Despite Aloe Records having only been around for two-ish years now—and despite its runner, Sun Yizhou, only being 24!—the label has quickly amassed a roster of all the most important players in the Beijing experimental music scene. 麻布 diaries is easily one of the best releases from Aloe to date. Each track feels like a complete idea that stands on its own as a meditation or experiment. The way Soloveitzik explores clarinet resonance on "七 [南麻布]" [track 1] and "八 [南麻布]" [track 3] indicates a level of control over his instrument where the frayed harmonic edges that free solo reedists typically like to exploit coexist in tension and vacillation with a traditional, clean intonation approach. On "Minato music salon room #5?" the sound of Soloveitzik plucking the reed of the clarinet itself has a delightfully metronomic cadence, conveying the deep satisfaction that can sometimes be found in the act of marking time. The sound of smooth jazz wafting in the distance captured on "[蔵王温泉] thousand eyes," the album's final cut, makes for a strangely reflexive conclusion to one's listening experience: the recording act itself occurs within a saxophone; this gesture, a classic resonance study of sorts, is used to capture a musical form that, while using the same instrument, may as well be on an opposite branch of the genealogical tree that stems from the earliest jazz. The gap in between them yawns, as do the silences that ground the rest of 麻布 diaries. But no patch of negative space on the record is entirely serene or eerie, calming or provocative, etc.—at any given point, it could be one, the other, or both. Which is, of course, the beauty of it all.