In 描奏をきく (Kiku (sense) the [drawing + sound]), Shiori Sasaki dissolves the boundary between visual art and experimental music, constructing a work that listens to the act of drawing as much as it observes it. The title’s layered translation becomes a key to the project—this is not simply about sound accompanying image, but about the mutual evolution of the two in real time. The album originates in Sasaki’s performance practice, where ink, paper, and gesture become audible events. Microphones capture the friction of tool against surface, the textures of movement, the ambient air around the artist’s hand. These sounds interlace with her acoustic improvisations—bowed strings, voice, minor percussive incidents—creating a continuum in which visual marks and sonic traces are inseparable. Listening to 描奏をきく is akin to sitting inside the drawing itself. Every stroke translates into a timbral shift; every pause in the visual rhythm becomes a pocket of silence in the audio field. The work resists spectacle, instead embracing intimacy: the scale is small, almost domestic, yet the attention it requires is vast. Sasaki’s music adopts the pacing of patient observation, inviting a deep, sustained form of listening. Conceptually, the project plays with synesthesia—not as metaphor, but as practice. By tying the rhythm of line to the rhythm of sound, she exposes how perception migrates across sensory borders. Drawing becomes another instrument; sound becomes another kind of mark. The Zappak release frames the album within a lineage of works that investigate the intersection of art forms without subsuming one to the other. Packaging and liner notes emphasize Sasaki’s emphasis on process rather than product. This is music that documents a moment of creation rather than presenting a finalized object—it remains open, porous.
From a compositional standpoint, the album inhabits minimalistic structures, leaving abundant room for breath and texture. The recorded space is used deliberately: close mic captures amplify the smallest sonic details, while occasional shifts into room perspective offer an acoustic “zoom out,” revealing the environment in which both image and sound occur. Emotionally, the work balances fragility with deliberate placement. Sounds emerge with the same inevitability as brush marks—the line bends because it must, the tone decays because it will. Sasaki’s restraint ensures that each event, visual or sonic, carries weight without being overemphasized.
By the closing moments, 描奏をきく has shifted from being a document of a specific performance into something larger—a meditation on the transient intersection of media, and the way attention itself becomes an artistic material. Shiori Sasaki leaves the listener not with a single image or melody, but with an awareness of having occupied a space where sound and drawing were, for a time, the same act.
