Research: Non-musical sound in Japanese art 1955-1979
Encountering Imai Norio's Two Heartbeats of Mine
Lou Mallozzi 2023
I hear muffled throbs in indistinct rhythms, then approach the suspended piece, lonely, floating above the floor, unanchored, fragile. Clinical and poetic. Two loudspeakers at chest height, joined at the rims facing into each other rather than out toward the world, enclosing a cone of air that they share, a vibrating hollow in which they speak to each other. I am eavesdropping on this closed circuit of intimate interchange, much like the diagnostic listening technology that was used to make the recordings, which eavesdrops on the fetus nestled in the womb.
...The noisy recordings carry the trace of the transducers registering not only the heartbeats, but also registering technology’s own limits, its struggle to render the life-pulse. This is part of the sadness of the piece: the fragility of the rendering, the fragility of our listening, the fragility of the heart’s displacement, the fragility of the heart itself with its rhythmic illusion of endlessness echoed in the endless tape loops that feed the work. We call such recordings “low fidelity” as if they have failed to isolate the source from its surroundings and somehow fall short of our desire. But what they unveil is a poetic fidelity to the event and to the process, transformed into the poetic fidelity of our encounter with the artwork, which humbly lays bare its elements.