Imu Plastos by Carl Stone & Asuna

 

What is the essence of collaborative work? How does it work exactly when you think of the modern way of exchanging materials, samples, working on the sound files individually and then incorporating them into the outcome of the work between the artists?

It is individual and always puts forward ideas of the abstraction that the methodology and the policies of how you arrange music forward.

This work of Carl Stone and Asuna Arashi is somewhat and individualised form of answer to those questions. They have gone through a long way and process to create their own material using different strategies of collaborative work and composition.

The result is a stunning work of those two helping and supporting each other in many ways. The tracks here vary between experimental electronics and modern composition with precise movements and great handling and pacing of themes that can be both thrilling and packed with different grains of sounds, different moods and the textures.

It is both easy and difficult to classify which begs for immersing yourself more and more into it.

As usual – a classy release of Room40 from Brisbane, Australia.

This is the first recording album by Carl Stone and ASUNA (Asuna Arashi).

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 mysterious 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”. 

credits

releases April 10, 2026

Performed by Carl Stone and Asuna Arashi

Recorded by Hideaki Hayashitani on 12th of June Nanahari, tokyo

Mixed by Asuna Arashi June-August 2024 at Nomachi art studio, Kanazawa.

Mastered by Lawrence English at Negative Space

Bandcamp