Passages

1. Claro
2. Mugenkaidan
3. Silhouette
4. Denkmal

about

“Floating, textural sounds scrub our minds clean. Passages stings through an emotional current threaded through ambient corridors and elegiac tonal patterns. Ayami Suzuki shapes her voice into an entire universe, sparse and expanding beyond the margins undeterred. Each vocal drift winds around another, creating layers upon layers of transient sonic energy. Imbued with a faint glow, aural clouds become formless, immersive atmospheres where time moves backward. Even with its wistful undercurrent, Passages is edifying at every turn. Another stunner from one of my favorite artists of the last year.”
(Review by Brad Rose, Foxy Digitalis)

“There’s a tendency for solo vocalists working with electronics to reach for ethereality, but while Tokyo-based Ayami Suzuki’s work is bathed in spectrality, her vocal pieces on Passages resist being subsumed by the effects and cavernous echoes she works with. It’s clearest on ‘Mugenkaidan’ and ‘Denkmal’, where synthetic additions are less prominent than elsewhere. As vocal phrases get sucked into a swirl, she modulates the tone of her voice so that each new note and melody line shines rather than blurs, a constant reassertion against the slow rising echo. It’s a gorgeously harmonious, head-fixing journey of a tape, where Suzuki stamps herself out as an active protagonist in reshaping the ether rather than disappearing into it.”
(Review by Daryl Worthington, The Quietus)