Bit Diary

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A Japanese musician with a well-stamped passport and an eccentric range of dispositions. Each entry in Yuko's "Bit Diary" offers a clever treatment of samples and field recordings from a different global locale, however brief the stay (and many of these stops are barely a minute long). It can't be called "techno," despite the frequent presence of electronic rhythms, and the processing is often too crude or minimal to qualify as electroacoustic experimentation. So, with the most obvious qualifiers rendered useless, what is "Bit Diary"? I'm not about to even venture a guess, but the CD is nothing if not fascinating. One minute Yuko is accompanying (mimicking?) the twitter of birds and crickets with a consummately delicate and Morton Feldman-like arrangement of piano and electroharmonics ("Hikone_Chasle.Shiga.Japan"); then she's cobbling together dogs, carpentry noises, gongs, speech and fibrillating high-MHz pulses into loosely rhythmic concrète ("McCoppin.SanFrancisco.CA.USA"). On her own, Yuko strays from minor dabblings with sampled incongruities and Döppler-treated videogame music to the strange play of helium-voiced Japanese childsong and marimba heard in the wonderful "Gardena.LosAngeles.CA.USA." Like 1/Tau's similar "Musicforcicadas," this piece begs to accompany reels of abstract animation. But some of her most interesting results arise from collaborations with other musicians. "Chicago.UL.USA," created with Claude Willey (Ex-Mirror), is hectic tape-collage anti-techno; "Berkeley.CA.USA," recorded during a Stateside performance with Carl Stone, Katt, Ron Heglin and Dan Plonsey, experiments with a radical dissection of vocal samples into roughly hewn Schwitters-like syllabic poetry and rich vowel-sound drone. Takecha's remix of "Tararatta" works Yuko's odd soundings into an uncommonly lively piece of tech-house music. It's far more effective than Yuko's own somewhat clunky club-ifications ("Aoyama.Minatoku.Tokyo.Japan" and "Gili_Trawangan.Lonbok.Indonesia"), confirming that "Bit Diary"'s intriguing sketches are best served by such second-hand remixology.