Carl Stone, Asuna

Spring 2024. Carl Stone and Asuna performed together for the first time at an international experimental music festival held in Kanazawa city, where Asuna lives. Carl Stone is a pioneering composer of computer sampled music. and Asuna known for its “100 Keyboards” performance, played in this duo with over 100 toy instruments, samplers, and synthesizers. Carl samples and processed the sound of Asuna's various toys in real time. Asuna then incorporates the sounds into her own sampler and sends again the signal to Carl. The two transformed the sounds on the live show, music born mysteryous cultural parade of toys was stirred up by the electronic sounds, melting one into the other. They then on to record in the studio, Tokyo.

For the studio recordings, we used the same methodologies, but pushed ourselves in new directions to give the strength that would be record stuff. Asuna then edited the song based on ideas that were in the opposite direction to the way the two performed on the recording. "Sampling" comes from the ancient Latin "exemplum," which means the act of juxtaposing something taken from measurement or observation, and it is self-evident that a sample is made because of an object. However, as music is an art of time, the editing was done in such a way that the relationship between the sample and the object is reversed. In other words, Carl's sample and the editing of the target sound made of electronic sounds are placed before Asuna's sound, and the original sound is placed after it (except "Casual Resonant"). This album is a composition of improvisations in which Asuna sliced Carl Stone's sampling idea from the opposite direction when editing the samples. 

Mirroring the process of how that album was compiled, each song title on the album is made up of anagrams of Carl Stone & Asuna. This is because the process of the duo felt like an anagram, as if Carl Stone reconstructed Asuna sound and Asuna further re-edited it from the upside down. And, the 1st album title is "Imu Plastos”. "imu" is Lithuanian for "to take", and it is the final form of the root of the word "sampling". sampling > saumple > emere > imu. "Plastos" is a Greek adjective and the root of the word "plastic". The idea was derived by tracing the roots of Carl Stone's pronoun "sampling" and Asuna's pronoun "toys”.