A vital tape work returning to circulation thirty-six years after its private cassette debut. Mieko Shiomi's 1990 memorial for George Maciunas, self-released that year on a privately circulated cassette and unheard in proper edition since, now receives a first ever CD reissue, mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. In accordance with the composer's wishes, this edition presents the work's two sides spliced together into a single continuous piece.

By 1990 Shiomi had already lived several musical lives. A founding member of Group Ongaku alongside Takehisa Kosugi and Yasunao Tone at the dawn of the 1960s, she had helped open Japanese postwar music to free improvisation, action, and the sounding of "objet sonor"; from 1964, working briefly in New York and then by mail from Osaka, she had become one of Fluxus's most quietly inventive voices, the author of Endless Box, the Spatial Poem series, and Disappearing Music for Face. The invitation to the Sub-Atomic Fluxus Festival held in Venice in 1990 marked a turning point. Returning to Japan with Venetian field recordings in hand, she set down a tape work whose private circulation across the decades has only deepened its aura.

The piece operates on a strict and beautiful conceit. The first half, originally side A, was composed from the ten pitches whose German names spell out, letter by letter, George Maciunas: C, Cis, Es, E, Eis, Ges, G, As, Ais, Ces. Shiomi performs them on synthesised harpsichord and organ, the sustained, slightly artificial timbres carrying the cipher with a strange tenderness. Across this cantus the field recordings she made at the Fluxus pavilion in Venice on the festival's opening day drift in and out, voices and ambient sound figured by the composer as gusts of wind carrying messages skyward. Among them are the voices of La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Eric Andersen, Willem de Ridder, and Ken Friedman, fellow travellers offering their own farewells. The second half, originally side B, is the same music played in reverse, an inversion that turns the requiem into a mirror, with messages audible only on the return.

The Latin inversion of the side titles, Ubi Fluxus / ibi Motus, "where there is flux, there is motion", binds the two halves into a single conceptual gesture, and the CD format here makes that unity audible in a way no cassette ever could. The transition from forward to reverse, once a physical flip, becomes a continuous passage. The composer has herself sanctioned this edit, and the result reframes the work as a single thirty-one minute meditation, the requiem unfolding and then quietly unwinding itself.

This CD edition is accompanied by an A4 eight-page booklet in Japanese and English, with a newly written commentary by Shiomi, photographs taken at the Venice festival, and reproductions of the score. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.