Masaya Ozaki - Mizukara

A Closer Listen

Mizukara is the fourth release by the Japanese-born, NY/Iceland based artist Masaya Ozaki. Rooted in the exploration of the ephemeral and the delicate, Mizukara doesn’t attempt to impress sonically, but immerses the listener in a private and personal pathway into sound. 

The study of the everyday and of how acoustic environments inhabit and shape us are not new ideas for creating soundscapes. In Ozaki’s investigations of these ideas, we are exposed to a continuity between the self and the environment. In almost all the compositions the periphery becomes the center and the center is continuously blurred in an effort to attune to the environment of each piece. In “Opið Rými”  we listen to objects scattered across the floor but we cannot be certain of where the piano and the flute stand acoustically. The bodies of sound become co-dependent in the microcosm of the piece and we are challenged to reflect on how the foreground and background operate in this instance but also in general. 

In pieces like “Evening Regions” and “Siskin,” sparsity leads to spaciousness, spaciousness leads to reflection and reflection leads to letting go. Ozaki’s experience of the Icelandic landscape is beautifully engraved in the repetitive sequences that form the main thread of each piece. Like the lines of mountains as seen from afar during the setting sun, we attend to the foreground as a continued and repetitive shadow and the background as an open and warm horizon. 

The inward quietness of “Frá Vatni” leads us back to the darkened foreground at dusk. We become part of an obscured and esoteric almost magical place, perhaps among the mountains of the inland, only to find light again in the closing “Skerpla,” which according to Old Norse refers to the eighth month of the year or the month of brightness and marks the transition to summer.

Mizukara, although exploring the self as a blurry and porous territory, also beautifully introduces us to a very personal and delicate experience of a particular time in the life of the artist where the self and the environment are constantly in dialogue and where the later seeps through the artist’s continuously evolving self. (Maria Papadomanolaki)