Artist Statement

MP3 (2014)

The title of this piece refers to Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room (1969), in which Lucier records himself narrating a text and then plays the recording back into the room, effectively re-recording it. To create this new work, Ohkubo compresses sound using an MP3 converter, creating a disruption, and repeats the process in order to explore the aesthetic of glitch and experience the beauty of morphing sounds.

• Motoki Ohkubo is a Japanese composer and media artist. He has studied with Masataka Matsuo, Takeyoshi Mori and Masahiro Miwa. His compositions have received an ACSM 116 award from Atelier de Creation Sonore et Musicale (Japan, 2010) and were selected for Sound Walk (Portugal, 2010) and Close, Closer in the Musica Viva Festival (Portugal, 2013), as well as being exhibited at the Chiyoda Art Festival (Japan, 2014), the Muestra Internacional de Música Electroacústica MUSLAB (Mexico, 2014), Yokohama Smart Illumination Award (Japan, 2015) and ACOUSMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE III “RAW” in Sweden in 2014.

Text with images (PDF)  p. 111