PLASTIK LIEB by Il GRAND SILENZIO

Atsuo Ogawa: banjo
Minoru Sato: electronics

"Meeuw Muzak continues its journey towards unspecified horizons, leaving the footprints of a different animal each time. If you’re a good tracker and you know your fauna then everything is cool, otherwise this stuff will go over your head while you’re looking down at shapes in the hot and shifting sand. This latest example to puzzle your ears is from the Japanese duo Il Grande Silenzio, who both also work in the field of contemporary art. Perhaps unsurprisingly, listening to this music is a little like looking at something, maybe the “silent characters in a monotone world” referred to on the Two Acorns website. There’s a lot of space to these slow pieces, both dimensional and durational, but upfront in your field of vision sits Atsuo Ogawa and his banjo, a rarely-represented instrument in improvised music but very effective here. Then quietly somewhere at the back we have Minoru Sato playing self-built electronics. There’s an interesting marriage of form and content whereby the recording method seems intended to highlight the contrast between the brash and folksy tones of the banjo, albeit played in simple, clear, isolated notes, and the mysterious tinkle and scrape that the ear strains to hear behind. One feels witness to the unfolding of a narrative you can’t fully comprehend, and the effect is to be pulled into a reverie. Il Grande Silenzio is the title of a spaghetti western, which seems a perfect fit with the lingual ambiguity of these two pieces.
Pete Um (2014)"

"Meeuw Muzak, the label, and Minoru Sato, the musician, aren't the busiest around; or, let's rephrase that, not always the most visible ones. Meeuw Muzak's 44th release is obviously a 7" (besides 2 10" records and one 8" record there wasn't anything else) and here's the work of Il Silenzio Grande: Atsuo Ogawa on banjo and Minoru Sato on electronics. I wasn't blown away by their debut album on Two Acorns (see Vital Weekly 844), which I maybe thought was all too similar and maybe a bit non-descript, especially Sato's part of it. But also I surely missed out the conceptual edge of this. Maybe what Il Grande Silenzio does is popmusic? That's a thought I had when I was playing this 7". Here Sato's sine waves come out loud and clear, while Ogawa on the banjo plays some very sparse two notes, every now and then, also loud and clear (I did turn up the volume, I must admit). The other side has a start-stop motorik sound every once in a while. This makes this a totally different song, but surely a great one too. In this format, these two songs, Il Grande Silenzio made much more sense! Excellent record!!
Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly (2014)"