30/30 is a 30-minute piece composed by So Takahashi to accompany an art exhibit consisting of 30 photographs of empty rooms. Given the visual subject matter, one would expect the accompanying audio to be similarly uncluttered. And is it ever. Takahashi finds the sound of a sine wave fascinating, and much of the music here is built from these base-level tones. (If you're having trouble imagining the sound of a sine wave, imagine the tone that plays over the color-bar test pattern during tests of the Emergency Broadcast System.) It doesn't get any less cluttered, harmonically speaking, than a sine wave.

In some respects, music this abstract built from sources so simple seems hard to evaluate. How varied and deep can responses to arrangements of sine waves be? My reference in that respect is the Ryoji Ikeda piece "Interference 003," which consists of nothing but slowly shifting sine waves, but manages, through the juxtaposition of tones, to be absolutely mesmerizing. Compared to that piece, 30/30 comes up far short, and much of it is as dull as it sounds on paper. So there must be some hidden science behind this kind of microtonal dissection.

Then again, "excitement" isn't really the point when you're talking about audio to accompany photographs of empty rooms. So, in another respect, 30/30 works. The CD booklet contains all 30 photographs from the exhibit (many of the empty rooms are commercial spaces, including an abandoned Blockbuster Video), and flipping through them while listening, the music makes a bit more sense. Occasionally, samples break through the purely electronic surface-- mostly bits of crowd noise, perhaps the ghosts of past visitors to these empty rooms. It's spooky when it happens, reminding me somehow of the scene in The Shining where Jack Nicholson has a conversation with the dead guests in the banquet room.

And Takahashi does seem to have a flair for dynamics. Somewhere around the nine-minute mark (like early pressings of Prince's Lovesexy, the disc consists of one long track-- just don't go fast-forward searching for another "Alphabet Street"), a warm, pulsing drone overtakes the sine wave beeps. When it disappears four minutes later, leaving behind only a 60 Hz bass tone, we get an idea of just how stark the music is. I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a little thrill out of the contrast.

Then, some time after the 24-minute mark, a techno beat folds into the mix. Just a simple thump and high-hat, naturally. As it chugs along, all the earlier sine waves return, then the drones and the samples, until the piece finally becomes downright busy. What this has to do with empty rooms is anyone's guess, but this dense sound is definitely the most interesting passage on the record. And then, after a few minutes, it ends, and we're back to the atmospheric sounds of my own empty living room. Not quite as interesting as 30/30, but close.

-Mark Richard-San