Ken Ueno: Wavelengths

As a concise introduction to Ueno’s universe, it would be hard to imagine a better collection than this percussion-focused portrait album. From the subtlety of the title track, composed for vibraphone and sine tones and played with sublime sensitivity by its dedicated Karen Yu, to the increasingly dense …a.m… for a percussion quartet playing snare drum, vibes, metal pipe, and hacked alarm clocks, his creativity and spirit of inquiry come through loud and clear. Yu’s Up-Strike Project does a beautiful job with that piece and also delivers the closing track, Phase Patterns Of Likeness Slightly Off. Its lush sonorities come as a relief after the intensity of I am the uncle who sees past lives, a “collage of a collage” with fragmented vocals and electronics that throb and whine. After seeing Ueno nearly drown himself for his art, I would have been disappointed not to have one piece that was at least somewhat confrontational!

— Jeremy Shatan, 1.10.2026

American musical life in the 21st century is no less variegated than that of the 20th, when all the works performed by the Calidore Quartet except the one by Williams were written. But contemporary American composers such as Ken Ueno (born 1970) very often create music using techniques that distance themselves from any specific geographical location and focus on sound production that is as universal as it is off-putting to those more interested in traditional forms and/or instruments. A (+++) New Focus Recordings CD of four Ueno works, performed by the composer and members of a group called The Up:Strike (sic) Project, treads the boundary between music and noise in a way that will be familiar to anyone acquainted with today’s compositional techniques and the instrumentation used to bring conceptualizations into auditory reality. Wavelengths (2019) is for a solo vibraphone on which speakers have been placed to emit sine tones that expand the notes being played. It is one of those extension-of-technique works that so many modern composers favor in looking for ways to expand instrumental capabilities beyond those normally heard. It is followed on the CD by …a.m… (sic, period and ellipses included), a 2002 piece for percussion quartet that opens with white noise (a sound often heard in avant-garde material), moves into individual instrumental strikes, then eventually leads to cacophony until it ends with the sounds of tuned metal pipes. I am the uncle who sees past lives (2024) uses Ueno’s own vocals – extended, amplified and otherwise pulled and pushed beyond what the human “throat instrument” can produce on its own – along with electronics that produce the vague feeling of a forest or jungle setting. And Phase Patterns of Likeness Slightly Off, a 2023 work that is another percussion-quartet piece, intermingles four vibraphones in wholly nonthematic material that swells and subsides, joins and separates in ways that intermittently unite the performers and maintain them in thoroughly disconnected trajectories. All four of these works are quite extended as sound-pattern-based pieces go – ranging in length from more than 12 minutes to more than 20 – and all are aurally immersive for listeners inclined to desire the sound worlds that Ueno creates and explores. This Ueno-focused recording is emphatically not a CD for a general audience, but it is every bit as American in its way and its orientation as is the disc in which the Calidore Quartet uses its acoustic instruments to bring forth the sonic environments created and explored by Barber, Korngold, Marsalis and Williams.

— Mark Estren, 2.05.2026

The program for Wavelengths, the new album from composer Ken Ueno, makes it clear that percussion is the collection’s main focus. The title track, which opens the album, indeed centers on an instrument that in an orchestral setting lives in the percussion section.

But jazz aficionados know that the vibraphone can be a brilliant lead melodic and harmonic instrument.

A Focus on Percussion

“Wavelengths,” from 2019, is scored specifically for Karen Yu and her vintage vibraphone, along with three small speakers placed on the instrument. The speakers emit sine waves that differ microtonally from the vibraphone’s notes, creating interference patterns and difference tones.

The result: 12 minutes of contemplative sonorities that rely on those evolving harmonic or non-harmonic relationships to create musical meaning.

An Idea Lab

Another, very different track also features Karen Yu, this time with her percussion ensemble The Up:Strike Project. “…a.m…” dates from 2002, early in Ueno’s career. The composer describes it as “a kind of laboratory for ideas that have since become core to my artistic practice: the integration of microtonality, the transformation of noise into pitched material, and the search for new instrumental possibilities.”

For this piece Ueno created distinctive tubular instruments and repurposed a digital alarm clock to produce white noise. He fused these with standard percussion to create a long exploration of rhythmic and timbral possibilities.

Muted construction noise from outside my window accompanied my first listen – and did not sound out of place. And I mean that in a good way. (Listening to nontraditional music while in a New York City apartment has its own joys and perils.)

I suspect Ueno wouldn’t mind this. In fact, he describes the following piece as an “example of collaborative serendipity through travel and engagement with other artists.” “I am the uncle who sees past lives” started as a sound installation by a duo called ADRUNNOGNT, created from field recordings from a Thai jungle. The present piece is an interplay between vocal plosives, breath sounds, and obscure verbalizing with birdsong and ambient natural sounds – in Ueno’s words, “the jungle, technology, the human voice, and the surrounding world” – manipulated to create a hybrid natural-artificial sound environment.

Beginning in an ambient mode, the piece develops in intensity. Insistent wave patterns help fuel a creeping, more-or-less wordless angst.

In this way Ueno expands the album’s emotional palette in parallel with its sonic one.

For me, the intriguing 20-minute “I am the uncle…” is five minutes too long – the electronic/acoustic hum-and-wobble sequence of the second half hasn’t got enough to say to fill as much time as it occupies. When the ambient background environment returns in the final minute, it’s a relief.

Running Interference

The Up:Strike Project is back for the final piece, the meta-consciously titled “Phase Patterns of Likeness Slightly Off.” Like “I am the uncle…” this is a recent work. Scored for four vibraphones, it, like “Wavelengths,” takes advantage of Yu’s vibraphone’s ability to vary its motor speeds. (This reminded me of a recent Composer Portraits concert featuring Yarn/Wire performing the music of Andrew McIntosh, where similar effects were heard.)

Central to this piece are the beats that result from clashing microtones. (Anyone who has ever tuned a guitar or bass by ear knows this phenomenon.) But like “Wavelengths,” and unlike “I am the uncle…,” it’s pleasantly thoughtful. It evoked in me a kind of bemused meditation on the strangely human output of a very metallic instrument.

Physiovalence

Perhaps the music was resonating with the metallic elements in my body. Ueno defines a term I’d never heard before, “physiovalence,” as “the sympathetic resonance between performed sound and the listener’s body, the transmission of viscerality as both physical and emotional fact.” One could extend that idea to all musical experience: As long as there is a musician (or recording) and a listener, there is real physical interplay between the the sound and the auditor’s biology.

Ueno’s oeuvre reminds us of this acutely. That’s one of the merits of percussion, and of Ueno’s music on this album. By stressing the physical it hugs us close in a different way than does the emotion-focused music we mostly hear and groove to in our daily lives of living and hearing.

My advice: Read the composer’s liner notes on the individual pieces, listen to the music, and skip, or save for later, Robert Kirzinger’s precise but rather overblown and technical liner note essay. Ken Ueno’s own notes cast enough light.

— Jon Sobel, 3.11.2026

Avere una spiccata attitudine sperimentale significa anche molte volte compiere un’operazione di mimetismo musicale. Da questo punto di vista il compositore Ken Ueno ne può offrire buon esempio, grazie anche ad una nuova monografia da poco pubblicata su New Focus R. e intitolata Wavelenghts, in ossequio ad un pezzo omonimo per vibrafono e frequenze sinusoidali. La raccolta consta di 4 brani che prendono soprattutto in esame la composizione per percussioni del compositore, per la quale Ueno ha sistemato tecniche, fenomeni psicoacustici e processi musicali evolutivi in un’ottica di imitazione sperimentale; 3 dei 4 brani presenti vertono soprattutto sui vibrafoni (oltre che su percussioni standard) mentre uno è il risultato di un mimetismo vocale profuso su field recordings della giungla thailandese (Ueno è conosciuto parecchio negli ambienti musicali proprio per via della vocalità).

Il dettaglio sui pezzi rivela un’indagine accurata sulle altezze, sulla risonanza psicoacustica, sui toni differenziali dei vibrafoni e delle percussioni, che ha però anche una valenza estetica positiva. Per Wavelenghts l’indagine si concentra su un modello vintage di vibrafono, il Musser, con la precisa intenzione di sfruttare la velocità del motore del vibrato in rapporto ai battimenti acustici generati dalle onde sinusoidali formatesi piazzando 3 piccoli altoparlanti su specifiche barre del vibrafono; Karen Yu, la percussionista depositaria dell’esecuzione di Wavelenghts, segue una partitura indicativa delle barre da colpire, dei tempi in cui farlo, nonché indicazioni di velocità di regolazione del motore che sono importanti per determinare la risonanza del materiale dello strumento. Coordinando la lettura con le onde sinusoidali, il pezzo ottempera a due scopi, uno è quello di registrare frequenze e battimenti fuori fase, l’altra è quella di pensare alla velocità di regolazione come un parametro musicale mobile.

Una soluzione imitativa con implicazioni compositive arriva anche dai venti minuti circa di …a.m…, per quartetto di percussionisti con set specifico. Il titolo è un riferimento alla banda radio e alle frequenze di una sveglia digitale che dà il via al pezzo nell’assoluto silenzio dei musicisti; la sveglia viene posta un rullante e sintonizzata in una frequenza che restituisce rumore bianco ma gradualmente la sua presenza sonora comincia a confondersi con gli interventi dei percussionisti, pronti nell’eseguire parti ai rullanti e ad altri metalli che ne simulano a grandi linee lo spettro. Con un lavoro programmato sulle percussioni si ottiene un lavoro che ad un certo punto esonda il mimetismo della frequenza radiofonica e si sviluppa in una struttura percussiva combinata su ritmi e interventi che comunque sono nati dalla frequenza originaria della sveglia; in più viene destato interesse per un’azione coreografica concertata dei percussionisti. L’esecuzione è del The Up:Strike Project, un quartetto che sa interpretare bene gli obiettivi della sperimentazione di Ueno, così come succede anche in Phase Patterns of Likeness Slightly Off, il brano finale del CD che è una sorta di omaggio a Reich: 4 vibrafoni che suonano secondo un disegno di sfasamento temporale che vuol dare l’idea di un’illusione acustica, ognuno suonato con una partitura indipendente ma intenzionalmente provvista di un disallineamento studiato per creare alla fine un ampio ‘contorno’ sonoro di gruppo (i musicisti usano anche l’archetto per strofinare le piastre e ottenere anche in questo caso discrepanze). Ueno fa riferimento al movimento asincrono di uno stormo di uccelli, ma il carattere sperimentale di questo pezzo sta soprattutto nella ricerca dei toni differenziali e dei battimenti acustici che creano quegli intervalli sonori non corrispondenti a note, ricorrendo ad una partitura che ha maglie più larghe delle ripetizioni minimaliste e che è munita di interventi sui motori di risonanza.

Il pezzo senza percussioni è I Am the Uncle Who Sees Past Lives, che deriva da un’installazione sonora del duo ADRUNNOGNT (un duo artistico composto da Arnont Nongyao e Nguyen Ngoc Tu Dung, specializzato in installazioni con registrazioni ambientali); la collaborazione con Ueno è realizzata con field recordings catturati nella profonda giungla della Thailandia. Il mimetismo di Ueno si fonda stavolta sulla sua voce, che entra in circolo dopo che il field recording dell’ecosistema della giungla ha riempito l’ascolto per alcuni minuti: nell’incedere di versi di uccelli, insetti e altri suoni naturali compresi nel campo, Ueno si inserisce come in una sorta di percezione extrasensoriale, con canto sperimentale e tecniche vocali estese che vengono filtrate attraverso un megafono; si sente ansimazione, emissioni irregolari del respiro, fonemi plosivi e gutturalità che sono smorzate nel loro timbro a causa del megafono pur essendo però perfettamente in linea con l’ambiente sonoro profuso dal field recording.

La monografia di Ueno è un ponte di posizionamenti e idee che ben convivono nelle proiezioni di una sperimentazione del vibrafono e di un parco percussivo idoneo a sviluppare suggestioni estetiche. In questi pezzi si respira una teoria del ‘limite’ che prende origine da esperimenti sonori portati in un alveolo di imprevedibilità dei risultati. C’è ancora spazio per sorprendere, illudere, disallineare, grazie a Ueno.

Google Translation:

Possessing a pronounced experimental sensibility often entails engaging in an act of musical mimesis. From this perspective, composer Ken Ueno offers a prime example—thanks in part to a new monograph recently released on New Focus Recordings titled *Wavelengths*, a title chosen in homage to a piece of the same name for vibraphone and sine waves. The collection comprises four tracks that primarily explore the composer’s percussion-based output, a body of work in which Ueno has marshaled specific techniques, psychoacoustic phenomena, and evolutionary musical processes within a framework of experimental imitation. Three of the four tracks featured focus predominantly on the vibraphone (alongside standard percussion instruments), while the fourth is the result of vocal mimesis layered over field recordings from the Thai jungle (Ueno is, in fact, widely renowned within musical circles specifically for his vocal work). A closer look at the individual pieces reveals a meticulous investigation into pitch, psychoacoustic resonance, and the difference tones produced by the vibraphones and percussion instruments—an investigation that, crucially, also possesses significant aesthetic merit. For the piece *Wavelengths*, this inquiry centers on a vintage vibraphone model—the Musser—with the specific intent of exploiting the speed of the instrument’s vibrato motor in relation to the acoustic beats generated by sine waves; these waves are created by positioning three small loudspeakers directly onto specific bars of the vibraphone. Karen Yu—the percussionist entrusted with the performance of *Wavelengths*—follows a score that precisely indicates which bars to strike and when to strike them, while also providing instructions for adjusting the motor speed—a critical factor in determining the resonance of the instrument’s materials. By coordinating her performance with the accompanying sine waves, the piece achieves a dual objective: on one hand, it captures out-of-phase frequencies and acoustic beats; on the other, it reconceptualizes the motor’s speed setting as a dynamic, mutable musical parameter.

An imitative solution with compositional implications also emerges from the approximately twenty-minute piece *…a.m…*, written for a percussion quartet utilizing a specific instrumental setup. The title references the radio band and frequencies of a digital alarm clock, which initiates the piece amidst the absolute silence of the musicians; the alarm is placed atop a snare drum and tuned to a frequency that emits white noise, yet its sonic presence gradually begins to blend with the interjections of the percussionists—who stand ready to perform parts on snare drums and other metal instruments that broadly simulate the alarm’s spectral characteristics. Through this meticulously programmed approach to percussion, a work is achieved that, at a certain juncture, transcends the mere mimesis of the radio frequency to evolve into a combined percussive structure—one built upon rhythms and gestures that, nonetheless, originated from the alarm’s initial frequency. Furthermore, the piece sparks interest through the percussionists’ concerted, choreographic stage action. The performance is rendered by The Up:Strike Project, a quartet adept at interpreting the experimental objectives of Ueno—as is also evident in *Phase Patterns of Likeness Slightly Off*, the CD’s final track, which serves as a sort of homage to Reich. This piece features four vibraphones playing according to a design of temporal phasing intended to evoke the sensation of an acoustic illusion; each instrument follows an independent score—deliberately crafted with a calculated misalignment—that ultimately coalesces into a broad, collective sonic "contour" (the musicians also employ bows to rub the metal bars, thereby generating further discrepancies). Ueno cites the asynchronous movement of a flock of birds as a reference point; however, the experimental character of this piece lies primarily in its exploration of difference tones and acoustic beats—phenomena that generate sonic intervals which do not correspond to standard musical notes—and in its reliance on a score that possesses a looser structural weave than typical minimalist repetitions, incorporating specific interventions involving the instruments' resonance motors.

The percussion-free track is *I Am the Uncle Who Sees Past Lives*, which stems from a sound installation by the duo ADRUNNOGNT (an artistic pair comprising Arnont Nongyao and Nguyen Ngoc Tu Dung, specializing in installations featuring field recordings); this collaboration with Ueno is constructed using field recordings captured deep within the jungles of Thailand. This time, Ueno’s mimicry centers on his own voice, which enters the sonic circulation only after the field recording of the jungle ecosystem has immersed the listener for several minutes. Amidst the flow of bird calls, insect sounds, and other natural noises captured in the field, Ueno inserts himself—as if through a form of extrasensory perception—employing experimental singing and extended vocal techniques filtered through a megaphone. One hears panting, irregular breath emissions, plosive phonemes, and guttural sounds; while their timbre is dampened by the megaphone, they remain perfectly aligned with the sonic environment diffused by the field recording. Ueno’s monograph serves as a bridge connecting various stances and concepts that coexist harmoniously within the scope of his experimentation—specifically, his exploration of the vibraphone and a percussion palette ideally suited to evoking distinct aesthetic impressions. These pieces resonate with a theory of "limits," originating from sonic experiments conducted within a crucible of unpredictable outcomes. Thanks to Ueno, there remains ample room to surprise, to beguile, and to disorient.

— Ettore Garzia, 6.01.2026

It first comes to mind when meeting a contemporary composer for the first time to read his bio, and the one provided in the booklet to this CD gives a vivid image of Ken Ueno as a composer without boundaries. In the list of his prizes (both Berlin and Rome), commissions, and premieres, one discovers that Ueno has written a concerto for bass recorder, a concerto for extended voice with himself as soloist, and most intriguing of all—not to mention unique in the history of music—an installation project, Daedalus Drones, “featuring a fence labyrinth housing a swarm of flying drones choreographed for performance.”

The cliché terms applied to New Music—exploratory, experimental, sound world, investigation—actually come to life in this collection of three works for percussion and a vocal piece starring the composer. A thicket of technical jargon in the booklet is aimed at insiders, but there are bright spots like the following: “In this piece the jungle, technology, the human voice, and the surrounding world all converge in a singular, ephemeral experience.” I immediately felt that I wanted the experience.

In a sense the primal word “jungle” provides an entry point for what Ueno is aiming at throughout, and for what a general listener can become engaged with. It is standard fare in New Music to crisscross sound and music, noise and pitch. The mystery of how music emerged in prehistory can’t be solved, only surmised. Ueno has the idea of making the mystery his driving inspiration. This turns out to be a very fertile area, because the gap between a sound and a musical note isn’t empty—it is a shadow land where vibrations arise, providing innumerable possibilities for how primordial music can be made even today.

Ueno’s four pieces give one the pleasure of sharing a musical mystery tour, leaving aside all the New Music mechanisms at work. The opening work, Wavelengths, is also the album’s title work, for solo vibraphone. The instrument’s shimmering quality is augmented by three small speakers that create microtones as well as interference patterns. Vibration, in other words, is brought to the forefront. The impression on the ear, mixing sustained tones, single notes or groups of notes, is like a subtle, at times fragile, continuum. This subtlety extends to phantom music, as described in Ueno’s notes, regarding “a psychoacoustic phenomenon (one that you only hear in your head), sounding at a frequency that is the subtractive difference between the two sounds.” The impeccable performance by Karen Yu conveys every delicate nuance.

Yu commissioned Phase Patterns of Likeness Slightly Off for a percussion ensemble she founded, The Up:Strike Project. Ueno was intrigued by Yu’s antique vibraphone, which has more variable speeds in its motor than modern vibraphones, leading to different rates of vibrato. To push the possibilities into a gleaming cloud of vibratos, the piece calls for four vibraphones. If you can imagine throwing four pebbles into a pond and seeing concentric rings spreading out from each one, here is the aural equivalent. The sonority is subtly wavering, as indicated by “slightly off” in the title. The work’s free-form rhythms have a refreshingly spontaneous air. One comes away feeling that vibration in itself can be artful.

As a contrast to this delicate intimacy, a broader landscape unfolds in …a.m…, which is nebulously poised in the space between waking and dream. In Ueno’s words, he is “using percussion and digital alarm clocks to evoke the peculiar stillness of the early morning hours.” Snare drum and metallic interjections are prominently featured, but the range of percussion is quite varied. Each particular sound tends to be fleeting, in the way the state of just waking up fills your head with a vague menagerie of images as the world just starts to peek in. At 20 minutes this is a sizable trip inside imaginary space. The Up:Strike Project percussion battery combines noises and notes, allowing Ueno to play with the transformation of one into the other.

“Perhaps most notably,” he write “...a.m... marks an early step in my journey with bespoke and hacked instruments. A modified Sony Dream Machine alarm clock was repurposed as a noise source, an early instance of my ongoing fascination with recontextualizing everyday objects into musical tools.” Overall, the effect is of organized spontaneity, mirroring how consciousness works, delivering thoughts in a haze of swirling impressions.

As composer and performer, Ueno’s work with extended vocal techniques is a signature, demonstrated here by I am the uncle who sees past lives. The inspiration was a Thai independent film, “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” where the theme of reincarnation disclosed the porous boundaries between past and present. From this, Ueno drew a metaphysical analogy to sound. As he puts it, this piece “is about the ways sound lingers beyond its source, the way past lives echo into the present.” The festive premiere in Thailand involved him as vocal soloist surrounded by a 12-channel installation of prerecorded jungle sounds. “Beginning with breath-like sounds and plosives designed to merge with the granulated field recordings, my performance gradually transitioned to sustained, circular-breathed difference tones, modulated through my megaphone.”

If this description creates an expectation of something exotic and virtuoso, it is abundantly fulfilled across 20 minutes of eerie evocation. The outdoor premiere was one of a kind, but even reduced to a CD, the jungle field recordings are spectral. What Ueono does with his voice, none of which can be described as singing, mounts from silence to a mesmerizing intensity. There are stretches of inhuman, almost sci-fi, noises that send fleeting jitters through the listener. You realize in the midst of this unrestrained noisemaking that the birth of music wasn’t necessarily gentle and lyrical. It was just as much an attempt to bring the threatening, inexplicable, primordial sounds of Nature under control. In a way, Ueno reimagines music as a survival strategy. It might still be performing the same function today.

In any event, this release effortlessly occupies its own totally personal, absorbing niche in contemporary music.

Five stars: A fascinating investigation into silence, sound, and the primal roots of music

— Huntley Dent, 4.30.2026

With an explosive upward thrust followed by another protracted one, Phase Patterns of Likeness Slightly Off roars its crystalline way into existence, expertly performed by the Up:Strike Project and concluding this, a new portrait disc from Ken Ueno. This cloud burst of tone and overtone begins a multi-vibraphone exchange involving variously comingled configurations of striking, bowing, vibrating, beating, and the spaces infusing and surrounding each sonic projection. It is one of the two vibraphone-centric pieces bookending the disc, an expertly programmed precis of Ueno’s varied music and attendant sonic explorations.

Three of the pieces employ percussion, and the language is concise and precisely detailed, at least from this listener’s perspective. All of them work along these lines, but it should go without saying that each is an individual statement. Everything from Varèse’s carefully curated percussive groups to Stuart Saunders Smith’s icy vibraphone musings to Pierre Boulez’s impressionistic tone clusters is part of a syntax never overly indebted to them, one that embraces tonal ambiguity in what I’ll call an accessible fashion. Density never clouds the horizon, so that each gesture impacts, and is impacted by, the larger form as it evolves. The almost serialized progression of the sounds in play is experienced most clearly on the titular piece, an astonishing study in sonic convergence for vibraphone and sine tones. What is not readily apparent is that Ueno subtly manipulates the sine tones, interacting with Karen Yu’s obvious virtuosity, adding another layer of reaction and spontaneity. To suggest that the final piece augments the proceedings is to sell its originality short. It is somehow exponentially related to Wavelengths, or is it better to say that it amplifies and develops similar concerns? Both are true, and these are engrossing studies in what can be done when timbral homogeneity is examined at length and from multiple perspectives.

Indeed, it is tempting to ascribe a kind of Minimalist conceit to the music, though it feels like a disservice to push a descriptor that far, or to push the music that far into one box. The field recordings, certainly an external natural world, opening the visceral I am the uncle who sees past lives begin centerstage and do have a static quality to them, but they slowly fan out to either side, conjuring visions of a state of nature in flux. So, when gradual awareness of breath insinuates itself, it is not so much a change as a revelation, a glacial infiltration of multivalent consciousness in dialogue. What gives me pause in terms of categorization involves the material’s increasing fragmentation, more prevalent until the breath, through Ueno’s oft-used megaphone, erupts into vocal exhortation. It is a marvelous and disconcerting experience to hear a single pitch slowly emerge to complement the various utterances only to dominate and then multiply. The final sound, somewhere between breath and tremoloed static, seems both a summation and a concluding blankness.

Despite a concise sonic narrative, there is nothing simple about Ueno’s vision. The liner notes, including his own, elucidate everything and nothing. It could be, beyond every innovative aspect of its composition and execution, Ueno’s music relies on the mature incorporation of archetype. It captures everything fascinating about the ancient, constantly evolving, and ever-complex relationship between performer and technology, a true integration of varied sonic sources highlighting minute but integral characteristics of all involved, human and otherwise.

— Marc Medwin, 6.01.2026

With an explosive upward thrust followed by another protracted one, Phase Patterns of Likeness Slightly Off roars its crystalline way into existence, expertly performed by the Up:Strike Project and concluding this, a new portrait disc from Ken Ueno. This cloud burst of tone and overtone begins a multi-vibraphone exchange involving variously comingled configurations of striking, bowing, vibrating, beating, and the spaces infusing and surrounding each sonic projection. It is one of the two vibraphone-centric pieces bookending the disc, an expertly programmed precis of Ueno’s varied music and attendant sonic explorations.

Three of the pieces employ percussion, and the language is concise and precisely detailed, at least from this listener’s perspective. All of them work along these lines, but it should go without saying that each is an individual statement. Everything from Varèse’s carefully curated percussive groups to Stuart Saunders Smith’s icy vibraphone musings to Pierre Boulez’s impressionistic tone clusters is part of a syntax never overly indebted to them, one that embraces tonal ambiguity in what I’ll call an accessible fashion. Density never clouds the horizon, so that each gesture impacts, and is impacted by, the larger form as it evolves. The almost serialized progression of the sounds in play is experienced most clearly on the titular piece, an astonishing study in sonic convergence for vibraphone and sine tones. What is not readily apparent is that Ueno subtly manipulates the sine tones, interacting with Karen Yu’s obvious virtuosity, adding another layer of reaction and spontaneity. To suggest that the final piece augments the proceedings is to sell its originality short. It is somehow exponentially related to Wavelengths, or is it better to say that it amplifies and develops similar concerns? Both are true, and these are engrossing studies in what can be done when timbral homogeneity is examined at length and from multiple perspectives.

Indeed, it is tempting to ascribe a kind of Minimalist conceit to the music, though it feels like a disservice to push a descriptor that far, or to push the music that far into one box. The field recordings, certainly an external natural world, opening the visceral I am the uncle who sees past lives begin centerstage and do have a static quality to them, but they slowly fan out to either side, conjuring visions of a state of nature in flux. So, when gradual awareness of breath insinuates itself, it is not so much a change as a revelation, a glacial infiltration of multivalent consciousness in dialogue. What gives me pause in terms of categorization involves the material’s increasing fragmentation, more prevalent until the breath, through Ueno’s oft-used megaphone, erupts into vocal exhortation. It is a marvelous and disconcerting experience to hear a single pitch slowly emerge to complement the various utterances only to dominate and then multiply. The final sound, somewhere between breath and tremoloed static, seems both a summation and a concluding blankness.

Despite a concise sonic narrative, there is nothing simple about Ueno’s vision. The liner notes, including his own, elucidate everything and nothing. It could be, beyond every innovative aspect of its composition and execution, Ueno’s music relies on the mature incorporation of archetype. It captures everything fascinating about the ancient, constantly evolving, and ever-complex relationship between performer and technology, a true integration of varied sonic sources highlighting minute but integral characteristics of all involved, human and otherwise.

— Mark Gabrish Conlan, 6.01.2026

The New Focus label continues its bold explorations of the music of today with an exploration of both the music and aesthetics of Ken Ueno. Both experimentation and deconstruction inform Ueno’s aesthetic. The stripped-down, objective sound of percussion seems to inspire him. Here, there is micro-tonality but also an emphasis on the very transformation of sound: a type of alchemy, perhaps. The works here span some 20 years, but all demonstrate aspects of Ueno’s, what the booklet notes rightly call, “narrative richness.”

Previously on Fanfare, Ueno has appeared via the piece Ghost Flowers (New Focus again, on a disc called Adjacence, multiply reviewed in Fanfare 48:5, a beautifully dynamic, aurally adventurous piece in a performance of much vitality by Daniel Lippel) and Verdannupassana on a Neuma disc, Axolotl, in the same issue). The theme of reviewers’ reactions seems to be Ueno’s grit.

So to Wavelengths, for vibraphone, and performed here by Karen Yu on her antique Musser vibraphone. Ueno and Yu worked in collaboration toward this piece (as they did in Phase Patterns of Likeness Slightly Off). The piece is intended as an exploration of small fluctuations of pitch and timbre on the vibraphone: the effect is almost a sequence of “teasings” in that an established sound is “nudged” by those very fluctuations. Some of the results of initiating those fluctuations are not predictable in advance, so there is a real element of reaction in real time. Three small sine-wave speakers placed on specific vibraphone bars offer the gentle “grinding” against an even-tempered vibraphone. The beats between adjacent sounds generate the energy for change: a sort of “dominant-tonic” of today. In addition to the three smaller speakers, the performed sounds are recorded and played back on larger speakers, resulting in what the notes memorably (and correctly) describe as an “afterimage canon.” The experience has the effect of sensitizing the ear to change, particularly pitch, but also timbral. This is unrushed beauty; the music feels suspended in space.

Scored for percussion quartet and digital alarm clocks and written in 2002 for Sō Percussion, … a. m. … sounds out the liminal state between sleep and awareness. Tuned to static, their white noise deliberately references John Cage’s use of short-wave radios in his works, but Ueno extends the sound to percussion equivalents: sandpaper, snare drum rolls, and tom-toms. Ueno riffs on the meanings of “static” by taking it not only as radio sound but also stasis of event (the prevalent side drum roll). Here it is performed, highly atmospherically, by The Up:Strike Project (Karen Yu, Samuel Chan, Emma Ng, and Eugene Kwong). The sense of space in the recording is significant too: wide and directionalized, it helps to create an immersive experience (perhaps best on headphones).

All works were recorded in Hong Kong apart from one: I am the uncle who sees the past, which was taken down in Pattaya, Thailand. The piece originates as a sound installation (Awaken Amnesia) and has had a “life” that has built upon that history. So samples of that, from the artistic partnership ADRUNNOGNT (Arnont Nongyao and Nguyen Ngoc Tu Dung) are used here, combined by Ken Useno’s own improvised, microphone vocal improvisation. The piece includes what Ueno calls an “intentional rupture: a two-minute ‘barren’ silence in which the installation stops completely, leaving only the sound of the living environment—birds, traffic, the shifting presence of the audience.” That “silence” invites in vocal cadenza.

Maybe “living” is used in two ways there: where one lives, but also the act of being alive. Such duality is used, also in I am the uncle who sees past lives, which explores resonance, both sonic and in terms of the resonance of memory, including present and past lives, inspired by a film about an uncle who can do just that. “Jungle tech” (one does very much feel as if one is in a forest of some kind) is combined with the human voice. The sounds were taken from a “nearby jungle.” Liminality is important here, figuratively (the line between our life and past/future lives) and the organic (the jungle) and Ueno’s manipulations of that (the synthetic). Sonically, the result is a coexisting of the two (perhaps as we carry, minus conscious memory, our previous incarnations). The fascinating aspect is how Ueno weaves his own sounds (breath, plosives) and how they then move to circular-breathe difference tones (altered via a megaphone). The change in sound environment during the piece is extraordinary, and unique—although I very much suspect Stockhausen would approve of the work’s latter stages.

Finally, Phase Patterns of Likeness Slightly Off for four vibraphones, written at the request of Karen Yu. After the “jungle music,” suddenly we land in a phantasmagorical, shimmering soundscape. In Wavelengths, Ueno had used a separate staff for motor speed in the score; here, he expands the idea of the earlier piece, and brings motor speed variations into play as a major generating force. Ueno finds the “beats” that occur through tuning differentials “beautiful” and I have to say, I do agree. “They belong to the same physical realm as vibrato itself, and together they form the symbolic and sensory core.” There is an explanation in the booklet about a neologism, “apmonia” (taken from Beckett and referring to the character Neary in Murphy, and his ability to consciously stop his own heart). The piece also plays with the idea of a difference tone (a resultant tone that arises as the result of a particular combination of other tones), “a low tone conjured by the ear and nervous system.” Really, Phase Patterns is all about dualities and the result of interaction: between tones, and between the performers’ sound and the listener’s bodies. It is a mobile, acoustic sea that invites surrender from the listener.

Ueno’s mind is one hell of a place, and one I would like to continue exploring. It is fantastic that there is a full disc of his music here; but it does rather make me wish for more. Recording and production values are impeccable.

— Colin Clarke, 6.01.2026

Exposition, Embodiment, Empathy: An Interview with Ken Ueno

Each composer interview entails a unique set of challenges. Then, those who also perform approach the two disciplines on a continuum of convergence along which variation involves a series of fluid parameters encompassing an elusive fundamental. Having received the answer to my first question in an email from Ken Ueno, I understood that a very different experience was in the offing. He is a composer and performer, a vocalist but also something of a dramatist, and both facets of his art inform Wavelengths, his new disc on the New Focus label. But he is also an ethnomusicologist in everything but title. Time and time again in our interview, his compositional proclivities exist symbiotically with observation and empathy. He is concerned with the human condition at every level, from the microcosmic gestures to the turnings of transcultural and sociopolitical tides. More than that, Ueno articulates these conceits in a frame demonstrating the depth of his engagement, not only with music but with the musicians and the body-minds they bring to recording and performance. It is one thing to begin a viola concerto (Talus) with a blood-curdling scream, but it is quite another, as you’ll see in our interview, to cast that purportedly nonmusical gesture as an exposition. In that single act of redefinition, Ueno’s approach is as embodied as each concise gesture comprising his music. Whether in the aforementioned scream or in the minute shadings of his resonantly intricate Sonic Calligraphies series, for solo voice and megaphone, performative gesture is paramount and diverse. That said, while obviously open to the myriad forces and contingencies determining composition and performance, there is something about his musical rhetoric exuding unity. It would be overly simplistic to suggest that the unity comes from employment of specific musical devices or from a timbrally focused sound world, but neither really applies. The unifying factor is something deeper than that, something akin to the regular but ever-changing repetitions of breath or footsteps in juxtaposition. It could involve the act of subversion, certainly central to Ueno’s work, but tradition is more than present. It is paramount if only to be circumlocuted, but it is as audible as the references he brings to his answers to my questions. Every piece, even the percussion pieces comprising most of his new portrait disc, are imbued with difference even as their palette of ideas is consistent. Ueno creates sounds as edgy and as open as the music that brought him to the theatrical, artistic, and cinematic world of composition that comes into focus during our interview.

Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions! Of course we’ll get to the album, but first, let’s start with a question that I always ask. In this case, it’s even more appropriate given your varied interests and pursuits, philosophical and otherwise. What is your earliest sonic/musical memory, and at what point did you decide that music was to become your career/life pursuit?

My earliest sonic memory predates speech. I have memories from before I could talk—of records my parents played, the glow and murmur of the television, and the cadence of their voices as they spoke to me while changing my diapers. I remember understanding language before I had the physical dexterity to form words. There was comprehension without articulation.

I sometimes wonder whether that gap—between knowing and being able to say—pushed me toward vocalization. Toward sound before language. What you see before you now—this life as a composer and performer—is Plan B.

In high school, I had designed an entirely different future. I was born in New York, but at eight months old my family moved to Japan, and later to Switzerland. That’s where I first learned English—mostly from British teachers—so when we finally settled in Los Angeles when I was seven, I neither looked like my classmates nor sounded like them (I had picked up a British accent from my first teachers). I felt conspicuously out of place. I was told I was “American,” but I didn’t know what that meant.

Without a mentor and searching for coherence, I constructed Plan A, designed to address what I felt at the time as a deficiency: I would attend West Point, serve my country, and eventually return to California to become a senator. I earned a congressional nomination and entered West Point. Plebe year was the hardest year of my life, but I endured it. Then, before my second year, I sustained a serious injury during training and had to leave. I spent nearly two years recovering. At the time, it felt catastrophic. I was depressed and untethered.

Luckily, the year before West Point, I had discovered Jimi Hendrix and begun playing guitar. During my convalescence, I did little besides physical therapy and practice—eight or nine hours a day. The guitar became structure and refuge. By the time I was healthy enough to resume my education, I was writing songs and playing in bands. Tentatively, I began to think: maybe music.

I enrolled at Berklee College of Music as a guitarist. There I encountered Béla Bartók, and something shifted. Composition revealed itself not merely as expression, but as a way of thinking historically and structurally through sound. Plan B no longer felt accidental.

Around that same time, I encountered Tuvan throat singing. The idea that a single body could produce multiple pitches simultaneously stunned me. I taught myself to sing multiphonics and for nearly a decade lived a double life—writing chamber and orchestral works within the classical tradition while performing as an improvisor and experimental musician in parallel spaces. Eventually I received a commission to write a concerto for myself and orchestra, which allowed those two paths to converge.

Around the time I started to work on this piece, I rediscovered cassette tapes I made when I was six. I made nonlinear musique concrète. I was also recording vocals. My adult self, listening to my six-year-old self, was surprised to hear that I was singing multiphonics! I am old enough that I have observed many changes in my body, some of which affects what I can do or no longer do with my voice. When I was composing the piece, I had a moment of inspiration. I thought, “there ought to be elements of the piece that should change, as I change.” Inspired by the Ise Jingu, Shinto’s most holy site, which has been around since the eighth century, but marked by a curious ritual of regeneration—it is rebuilt every 20 years—my plan is to recompose the opening tape part of my piece, by editing sounds I made when I was six with sounds I make now, and sing on top of it live, but…every 30 years.

I can’t resist following up on the Bartók connection, as, on the surface at least, your music sounds worlds apart from his. What about Bartók led to a shift in your sonic consciousness?

When I first encountered Bartók, I was actually playing heavy metal. His music had an immediate impact on me—my body understood it before my mind did. There was a physicality to the rhythms and gestures that felt strangely familiar. At the same time, there was the allure of a deeper mystery. When I looked at the scores, it felt like encountering these intricate personal sudoku puzzles—structures whose inner logic I could sense but not yet fully decode. The idea that someone could construct a musical world with that kind of internal rigor and imagination fascinated me. The desire to reverse-engineer those puzzles—to understand how they worked from the inside—was one of the things that pushed me toward becoming a composer.

Since that time, my journey has also been one of gradually developing my own compositional and performance practice. What became increasingly important to me was thinking about how I could foreground voices that come from non-Western positionalities—what I have come to understand as subjugated knowledges, or what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls the epistemologies of the South. Those philosophical frameworks helped clarify a broader mission for my work.

At the same time, when I am actually composing or performing, those ideas are not something I consciously think about in the moment. In the act of making music, I am completely focused on sound—on pacing, resonance, breath, the physical sensation of producing tone. In a sense, those philosophical concerns have already been internalized; they are embodied. The body simply plays the sounds.

That’s also where the dramaturgical dimension of my work comes from. Many of the sonic materials I work with—extended vocal techniques, unstable resonances, physical exertion—are inseparable from the body that produces them. When breath, effort, and endurance become part of the sonic material, the performance inevitably unfolds like a situation or event rather than just a sequence of notes.

I sometimes think about this in terms of Shohei Ohtani at the plate. When he’s about to hit a home run, he’s not thinking about how his presence in Major League Baseball represents a broader cultural shift. Yet his excellence inevitably carries that significance. In a similar way, my work may engage questions of cultural identity, knowledge systems, and positionality, but those meanings emerge through the practice itself rather than through conscious calculation in the moment. The philosophical ideas help sharpen the mission, but in the moment of composition and performance, it is the sounds—and the body—that lead the way.

So let me see if I understand: the process of internalizing philosophies, knowledge systems, cultural models, and the like is essential to, but runs parallel to, the acts of composition and performance. They are symbiotic but separate in execution. Is that a reasonable assessment?

I wouldn’t say the processes are separate. It’s more a matter of deep internalization. Philosophical frameworks, cultural models, and different knowledge systems shape how I orient myself as an artist, but over time they become embodied rather than consciously applied. By the time I’m composing or performing, I’m not thinking about them explicitly—they’ve already been metabolized into instinct.

In that sense, they operate more like what Malcolm Gladwell describes as embodied excellence: after thousands of hours of immersion and practice, knowledge is no longer something you deliberately reference. It lives in the body. The action becomes immediate. Referencing Shohei Ohtani again: In the moment he’s about to hit a home run, he’s not reflecting on the cultural significance of his presence in Major League Baseball or what it represents for Asian identity. He’s simply hitting. But everything—years of training, discipline, and lived experience—is fully embodied in that swing.

For me, it’s similar. The philosophical questions matter enormously, but they’re upstream from the moment of making sound. In the act of composition or performance, I’m focused on listening, pacing, and the physical shaping of sound. The thinking has already been absorbed into the body.

To follow up, and in transition to discussing the music on Wavelengths (2019), you’ve said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that you see your role as composer transitioning to that of a facilitator of narratives. Given that so much of your work has a visual component, how do you circumvent potential limitations of recording as a medium for capturing the essence of your work? What in, or augmenting, the recording process have you used to bring the multidimensionality inherent in your narrative convergences to life in a home listening space?

I might propose reframing the question slightly. Rather than thinking about recordings primarily in relation to the visual elements of my work, the more meaningful comparison for me is between recording and the live experience of music. When I speak about the composer becoming a facilitator, I mean that in a social sense. As artists who gain visibility within institutions, we also gain the privilege of focusing on our own work. Increasingly, I feel a responsibility to use whatever platform I have to help create space for others—to amplify different voices and support artists and perspectives that have historically been marginalized. Facilitation, in that sense, is about shaping ecosystems as much as shaping sounds: curating projects, designing collaborations, and building contexts where multiple narratives can intersect.

The live performance environment is central to that idea. Music in performance is not just sound; it’s a shared social space where bodies, attention, and histories come into contact. Much of my work unfolds through that encounter—through physicality, spatial sound, collaboration, and the presence of performers and listeners together in real time. A recording inevitably abstracts some of that away.

But rather than seeing recording simply as a deficient version of the live event, I try to treat it as a different compositional environment with its own possibilities. One strategy is to foreground the body sonically—breath pressure, resonance, strain, and other traces of physical sound production. Even without seeing the performers, the listener can still perceive the corporeal dimension of the music. Another is to treat the recording space as a kind of virtual architecture: through microphone placement, spatial mixing, and editing, the listener’s home can become a miniature performance environment.

At the same time, I think the most important role of recordings of concert music may be to point back toward the live experience rather than replace it. As we move into an era of increasing AI precarity—where music can be generated, replicated, and circulated endlessly without human presence—the value of the live moment becomes even clearer. In live performance there is breath, risk, contingency, and shared attention. Those elements resist being fully abstracted into data.

So, for me, recordings function less as definitive representations of a work and more as invitations or portals. They allow the music to circulate more widely, but ideally they also direct the listener’s imagination back toward the embodied, communal situation where the work fully comes alive. In that sense, the recording doesn’t just document the music—it gestures toward the larger social and human ecology from which it emerges.

I suspected that my question was incomplete, and I’ll explain. As a blind person extremely sensitive to space in the playback of recorded media, I find the recorded versions of your compositions mesmerizing. The vibraphone in Wavelengths, during the “delayed” section, is never quite the same when phrases repeat. Its timbre is modified, but it also seems to emanate from a different place in my listening space. I was equating space to the visual component, but of course, your conception is more inclusive! Let’s take the two vibraphone pieces on Wavelengths. I’m sure that readers would be interested in hearing about the process (collaborative, instructive, etc.) of achieving the spatial component of these recordings.

Thank you for explaining that. Your description is beautifully precise, and it’s especially meaningful to hear it from someone whose listening is so attuned to spatial nuance. What you’re noticing in the vibraphone is not incidental—it’s really at the core of how these pieces are conceived.

Both vibraphone works on Wavelengths are built around interference patterns between pitches. In Wavelengths, the vibraphone is coupled with small speakers placed directly on the instrument that emit microtonal sine tones. The interaction between the vibraphone and those tones produces beating patterns and sometimes difference tones—psychoacoustic pitches that the listener perceives internally as the ear processes the relationship between frequencies.

Those beating relationships are constantly shifting. Even when the performer repeats a gesture, the acoustic conditions—resonance in the bars, pedaling, motor speed, and the relationship between the vibraphone tone and the electronic sine tones—are slightly different each time. That instability is intentional. I wanted the music to feel like a living field of interference rather than a sequence of identical repetitions.

The motor of the vibraphone also plays an important role. Its variable speed changes the rate of vibrato in the resonator tubes, which alters the beating patterns and the sense of spatial motion in the sound. In later work like Phase Patterns of Likeness Slightly Off (2023), I expanded this idea so that multiple vibraphones produce overlapping vibrato rates and beating patterns, creating a dense network of shifting interference phenomena.

In the recording process, we treated space as a compositional parameter. Microphone placement allowed us to capture both the direct attack of the bars and the halo of resonance around the instrument. During mixing, those elements could be subtly repositioned so that the sound sometimes feels fixed and sometimes feels as if it drifts within the listening field.

So the spatial effect you’re describing isn’t meant to imitate visual staging; it’s really about making audible the physical relationships between frequencies. In a sense, the space you perceive is created by the acoustics of interference itself—the way sound waves meet, collide, and reshape one another inside the listening environment and inside the listener’s own auditory system. Your sensitivity to that dimension is exactly the kind of listening the piece hopes to invite.

That’s true—you focus on the opening scream of the Viola Concerto, and for me that moment is absolutely foundational, but it operates a bit differently than a conventional analytical frame might suggest. I think of that scream as an exposition, but one that doesn’t need recapitulation. Once it happens, it’s inscribed in the listener’s body—it persists as a kind of perceptual residue. It returns as memory. In that sense, it establishes a kind of temperament from the outset—not in a pitch sense, but in terms of intensity, grain, and bodily threshold. It sets the conditions of listening.

At the same time, I think of that scream as a kind of marble block—a pure saturation containing a field of potential. As the piece unfolds, what happens isn’t development so much as filtering. Natural overtones begin to emerge from that noise, as if the material were being carved from within rather than constructed from outside.

That process culminates in the viola cadenza. When we arrive at that overtone melody, everything shifts. The orchestra falls tacet, and the space becomes intimate, almost fragile. We find ourselves holding our breath, attending to each note—whether those high overtones will speak or not is genuinely at risk. That risk is essential. It sharpens the listening. After the long trajectory of saturation and filtering, that moment feels like a convergence—an epiphany. The harmonic field that was latent in the opening noise becomes briefly, precariously legible. It’s not a recapitulation of the scream, but a revelation of what it contained.

And this is where I would connect it to Zetsu (2015). There, the starting point is almost the opposite in character but similar in function: a banal moment—hearing photocopiers while running errands—becomes the basis for the piece’s temperament. Rather than beginning from an inherited system, I let that contingent, everyday sound determine the tuning field. It was a way of pushing against the “hoity-toityness” of modernism—a small decolonizing gambit—by allowing something peripheral and unprivileged to generate structure.

So across these pieces, I’m thinking less in terms of fixed systems and more in terms of how temperaments emerge. In one case, from a saturated block that is gradually filtered; in the other, from an incidental sound that is simply attended to. In both, the goal is similar: to create the conditions for moments of convergence where listening itself becomes heightened, and something that was always there suddenly comes into focus.

I love how you subvert conventional terminology! An exposition as embodied potential! Now, focusing on the new album if you would, and given the various comingling processes inherent to your conceptions, I’m wondering about your collaborations. How do you inculcate those processes? What sorts of interactions did you have with the musicians on this album during its gestation and execution?

I tend to think of collaboration less as something I impose and more as something that emerges through interaction. My usual method begins with a research period, where I work closely with performers to develop sounds and techniques together. Those discoveries—what the instrument or body affords—become the basis for the piece. In that sense, the composition grows out of those shared explorations rather than being fully predetermined.

My long collaboration with Karen Yu is a good example of this. I’ve written a number of pieces for her over the years, and through that process I became very familiar with her instrument—an older Musser vibraphone. At one point, while experimenting with it, I noticed that the motor could run at much slower and faster speeds than newer models. At the extremely slow vibrato speed, it feels less like vibrato and more like microtonal beating—like the interference patterns you hear between closely tuned pitches.

That observation led to a transformation of the instrument itself. I selected three bars of the vibraphone that wouldn’t be used in performance and placed small speakers on them. The electronic part, played through those speakers, glides between microtonal intervals, effectively activating those bars sympathetically and turning the vibraphone into a hybrid acoustic-electronic, microtonal instrument. There is even a separate staff in the score to notate the motor speed, treating it as an independent musical parameter.

In the vibraphone quartet (written for Karen’s percussion group), this idea expands across four instruments, but without electronics—the acoustic complexity of the interacting motor speeds and resulting beatings is already rich enough. The focus shifts to how those subtle fluctuations accumulate into a shared field of resonance.

The vocal piece on the album, I am the uncle who sees past lives, developed through a different kind of collaboration. ADRUNNOGNT invited me to work with them, and the piece builds on their installation Awaken Amnesia Mole, created from field recordings of nearby jungles. I took their samples as source material, granulated them, and introduced subtle artifices—sounds that sit ambiguously between the organic and the synthetic—so that the processed and unprocessed materials coexist in an unstable middle ground. From there, I remixed and restructured the material into a new 12-channel work, which became I am the uncle who sees past lives.

The process unfolded almost like an exquisite corpse, in the sense that the work emerges through layered contributions rather than a single, unified authorial perspective. At the premiere, I performed within this 12-channel installation, allowing my voice to initially merge with the environment—breath-like sounds and plosives blending into the granulated field recordings—before gradually differentiating into sustained tones and circular-breathed difference tones through the megaphone.

There is also a moment of rupture—a two-minute silence where the installation stops completely, leaving only the ambient environment. That space becomes a kind of cadenza, a moment where the voice inhabits the present moment before dissolving back into the evolving texture of the piece.

Across these projects, what interests me is how collaboration creates conditions rather than fixed outcomes. By the time we arrive at the recording, what you hear is not just a composition, but the trace of those relationships—between people, instruments, environments, and ways of listening that were developed over time.

And beyond this question, I have one more, one, again, that I ask everyone: Can you describe a couple of projects, current or imminent, that you’re working on now?

I’ve just returned from Berlin, where I premiered a new work, Cybernetic Entanglements, with Viola Yip at MaerzMusik. It’s built around a wearable instrument that we share between our bodies, so the performance becomes a kind of cybernetic circuit—our movements and micro-gestures directly shape the sound in real time. The piece explores how the body and machine don’t simply interact, but co-constitute one another, so embodiment itself becomes a compositional force.

At the same time, I’m working on a very different kind of project centered on memory and voice. A recent piece, Noguchi Traces, for koto and archival voice, was premiered by Kyoko Kawamura this past December in Tokyo. It is based on answering machine recordings of Isamu Noguchi calling out to her—“Kyoko! Kyoko! Where are you?”. What interests me there is the idea of voice as a trace—something that persists beyond the body. The piece unfolds as a duet between Kyoko-san and this disembodied voice, a fragile dialogue between presence and absence.

We’re now preparing to perform the work in the glass pyramid at Moerenuma Park in Hokkaido, Noguchi’s large-scale landscape project. That setting adds another layer of resonance: Kyoko-san’s late husband, the architect Jun Kawamura, played a central role in realizing Noguchi’s vision for the park after Noguchi’s passing. So, the performance brings together multiple lines of connection—personal, architectural, and artistic—where memory is activated in place.

This summer, I’ll also be in residence in Yokohama for a month, where I’ll curate and perform a series of concerts and lead workshops. That residency is an opportunity to extend these ideas into a more social and pedagogical space—working directly with artists and participants to explore listening, collaboration, and experimental approaches to sound-making.

Alongside these, I’m continuing to develop immersive vocal work in spatial audio environments, where I treat the voice as something that can be distributed across space rather than anchored to a single body. I’m also extending my installation work with robotics and sound—projects where moving objects generate evolving interference patterns, creating a kind of drawing in both sound and matter.

Across these projects, I think I’m circling similar questions: how sound creates environments, how bodies and technologies shape one another, and how listening can open up different experiences of time, memory, and presence.

Thank you very much for the interview!

— Marc Medwin, 6.01.2026

The composer and vocalist Ken Ueno brings us 4 pieces that exist in very different forms, where microtonality, noise and timbre are experimented with in very meticulous ways.

The title track leads with just Karen Yu’s vibraphone, where space and tonality are key to the striking climate, and “…a.m…” follows with the Up:Strike Project in attendance, as the quartet emit methodical drumming and bell dynamics for nearly 20 minutes.

On the back half, “I am the uncle who sees past lives” enlists Ueno’s extended voice amid ambience, where the sounds of nighttime insects, distorted voices and distinct droning are sampled, and “Phase Patterns Of Likeness Slightly Off” exits with The Up:Strike Project’s lively vibes in a 4 part chorus that radiates harmonics and sonic waves of intrigue.

Ueno’s vision is nothing if not adventurous, where solo and larger settings illuminate a chamber and classical foundation that’s artistic and memorable.

— Tom Haugen, 7.08.2026

Ken Ueno's music is a careful, dedicated investigation into timbre that yields a profound sense of instability. This album especially presents a perceptual paradox: reiteration generates transformation. Gestures and sounds are repeated, yet never identically, their shifting dynamics and quality suggesting a volatile force at work beneath the surface.

A tense unison between vibraphone and sine tones opens the title track Wavelengths, a clear signal of how the piece will evolve as an exploration not so much of pitch but of timbre. The vibraphone's acoustic sound blends with the electronic sine tones into an unstable sonic surface; their beating and subtle perceptual interferences are the music's driving force, stretching the sense of time. Karen Yu's solo performance is particularly striking, as she takes extreme care to shape a precise sonic profile with dynamics, rhythms and phrasing. One senses her profound knowledge of this music, reflecting a long-standing artistic collaboration with Ueno, whose music depends on these micro-details of timbre, dynamics and tempo.

Significantly, three of the album's four pieces are scored for percussion. The particular clarity of percussive sound allows for a detailed investigation into the timbre of each easily decodable attack. ...a.m... for percussion quartet begins by immersing the listener in a repetitious carpet of white noise from rolling snare drums. From this broadband sonic foundation, sharp attacks gradually accumulate across each player's drum-set until the white noise gives way to clanging metallic resonances. In the piece's noisy first part, the distinction between foreground and background remains ambiguous and fluid. Only after the stark acoustic rupture from white noise into resonance do the drum-sets' isolated attacks, sudden rolls and sharp fragments take on a new effect: interrupting, fracturing and reorganising the temporal flow.

Phase Patterns of Likeness Slightly Off, the second percussion quartet work, investigates shifts in resonance and modulation. Scored for four vibraphones, the vibraphones' motors are crucial to the work's structure and development: they actively modulate the tail of each sustaining sound, generating internal pulsations and undulating micro-tonalities that destabilise the perception of temporal coordination between the performers.

I am the uncle who sees past lives, a solo work for voice and electronics performed by Ueno himself, presents a different relationship between acoustic and electronic sound. Whereas the album's percussion pieces draw their charge from sharp auditory borders, here, the voice is deeply embedded inside the electronics to the point that they become a unified, singular entity. The piece is structurally inseparable from Ueno himself, intricately tied to the vocal techniques he has developed over years of experimenting with his own voice. Sourced from a layered depth, the material functions just as Ueno writes: 'as if each event carried traces of something preceding and unseen'.

Ultimately, Ueno emerges as a composer far more concerned with unfolding an exploratory creative process than with presenting a finished, 'ready-made' musical object for passive consumption. Throughout Wavelengths, one clearly perceives the creative act caught in the process of its own making, as sonic environments are suspended between rigorous control and an openness to events. The musicians play a crucial role in this context: the score demands extraordinary accuracy in dynamics and in the decoding of micro-gestures, ensuring that the smallest timbral differences speak with absolute transparency. This objective is scrupulously achieved by all the album's musicians: members of The Up:Strike Project, founded by Hong Kong-based percussionists Karen Yu and Matthew Lau.

This is music that rewards attentive, sustained concentration and a willingness to inhabit slowly evolving sonic environments. It challenges not just how we listen, but how we witness the temporal unspooling of a creative act.

— Ruben Mattia Santorsa, 7.20.2026