Copyright pitchfork
But a venue full of strangers is a different environment from the sort of everyday domestic setting kankyō was meant to exalt and reassure, and likewise the lightning-in-a-bottle aspect of a live show differs from the reliability and sturdiness of installation music. If the music reacted with the venue, enhancing both the space and the emotional safety of the people within it, there’s no evidence of that in what we hear. We hear no crowd noise, no applause, no squeak of chair, no reverb bouncing off walls. The music is recorded so austerely it’s as if Sprague has jammed her field recorder inside the instrument itself. Sprague is best-known in her solo work for her use of modular synths, but here she performs on a polyphonic synth run through a substantial delay time. This setup allows Sprague to jam with herself, and means elements from earlier in an improvisation appear at a time Sprague might not necessarily anticipate, giving this music the lick of spontaneity she sought when she set out to Japan with no plan in mind. These tracks flit so quietly in the back of the subconscious it might be hard to notice how far they end up from where they began, covering great distances in short runtimes without seeming to move much at all. Notice how an idle pitch-bend on “Osaka” multiplies until the whole thing goes wonky, or how subtly “Tokyo 1” builds from a shimmer to a Stephen O’Malley-esque growl that’s a bit toothier than anything you’re likely to have heard piping over the speakers of a Muji store in Japan in the ’80s. This is deeply solitary music, the sound of Sprague jamming with her lonesome self in a room full of strangers with no plan in mind. As such, it inadvertently ends up evoking the road-warrior myth so beloved by Americans like Sprague—and the interiority it implies—more than any of its Japanese philosophical influences. Perhaps there were revelatory moments of communion between Sprague and the audience on the evenings she recorded the tracks on Cloud Time, but by the end of the album, I was mostly left with the reality of a touring artist packing up their gear and going back to the hotel, alone.
