W.M.O./r – w.m.o/r09 167.25MB FLAC
Training Thoughts begins with the noise of a train and immediately makes the usual question of authorship difficult. The train was not booked as a fourth musician. It has no name on the cover, did not arrive carrying an instrument and presumably remained indifferent to the concert taking place beside its route. Yet for long stretches it is the largest, clearest and most physically impressive sound on the recording. Its low mechanical moan enters the room from outside, rolls across the microphones and withdraws according to a timetable that Taku Sugimoto, Yasuo Totsuka and Mattin do not control. The musicians respond by refusing to compete. Instead of constructing a separate musical world strong enough to exclude the neighborhood, they allow the neighborhood to become the principal material. The result is not merely a quiet improvisation with picturesque environmental sound in the background. It is a reorganization of foreground and background so complete that the listener eventually becomes unsure which event is accompanying which.
The title is beautifully exact. A “train of thought” normally describes the internal movement connecting one idea to another. Training Thoughts makes that metaphor physical, placing thought beside an actual railway whose arrivals repeatedly interrupt, redirect and perhaps generate the performance. The added “ing” can also suggest thoughts undergoing training: attention being disciplined, habits of listening corrected, the mind taught not to discard everything that conventional music identifies as interference. The album does not ask the environment to become musical through decorative interpretation. It asks whether the category of music was the obstacle preventing us from hearing the environment clearly in the first place.
Recorded at Enban near Koenji Station in Tokyo, the performance belongs to a period when a number of Japanese improvisers were investigating extremely reduced activity, long silences and the social behavior produced by quiet sound. Taku Sugimoto had moved far from the busier free-improvised playing of his earlier years toward a practice in which a single guitar note could carry the structural importance normally assigned to an entire solo. Mattin was deeply engaged with this reductionist field but never entered it as a neutral stylist. His computer feedback retained the possibility of sudden violence, and his developing ideas about improvisation questioned whether musicians truly became free simply by replacing conventional musical language with a new set of refined underground habits. Yasuo Totsuka, the least publicly documented participant, sits between these visible poles with another laptop, contributing to a trio whose apparent inactivity is actually a continuous negotiation over responsibility.
Mattin later remembered that the first deliberate sound from the performers did not occur until approximately twenty minutes into the concert. That decision changes the meaning of everything preceding it. Twenty minutes is long enough for an audience to stop treating silence as an introduction and begin wondering whether the concert has already started, whether equipment has failed, or whether waiting itself has become the event. In ordinary performance etiquette, musicians accept responsibility for filling time while the audience accepts responsibility for remaining attentive. Training Thoughts leaves both duties exposed. If nobody plays, what exactly has the audience paid attention to? The trains, the room, clothing, breath, nervous movements, electrical systems and the collective pressure of people trying not to disturb one another all become audible.
This is not silence in the literal sense. The recording is crowded from its first second. Railway vibration enters with a scale no laptop or softly touched guitar needs to imitate. Distant traffic and room tone form layers whose complexity would be difficult to compose intentionally. Small human noises become sharp because the musicians have removed the masking blanket of continuous performance. The album therefore reverses the conventional relationship between musical richness and activity. Less deliberate production creates more perceptible information.
Sugimoto’s guitar notes arrive under impossible pressure. After such an extended wait, one note cannot behave casually. It does not enter an empty field but a field the listener has already learned to regard as complete. The guitar risks seeming unnecessary, even intrusive. Mattin recalled being overwhelmed by Sugimoto’s second note and deciding that the recording deserved release because of it. That response says much about the kind of listening the concert produced. The note’s importance does not come from harmonic complexity, speed or instrumental difficulty. It comes from placement, timbre, timing and the accumulated awareness surrounding it. Every preceding minute prepares the ear to recognize the smallest intentional vibration as an enormous ethical decision.
Ethical is not too grand a word here. In most improvisation, playing is treated as participation and silence as restraint. Training Thoughts complicates that assumption. Producing sound can become a way of claiming territory, demanding attention and imposing one’s personality upon a shared situation. Remaining quiet may create space for others, but it can also become an aesthetic posture through which the musician displays exquisite sensitivity. The trio must continually judge whether playing will deepen the situation or merely announce that a professional performer remains present. Silence offers no escape from ego if everyone recognizes it as the approved language of the scene.
This tension separates the album from ambient music designed to merge gently with its surroundings. Training Thoughts is not comfortable wallpaper. Its quietness creates vigilance. Mattin’s laptop is capable of computer feedback that may erupt without the gradual preparation supplied by instrumental gesture. Even when no explosion occurs, that possibility remains active. A guitarist visibly lifts a hand before striking a string; digital sound can arrive with almost no readable warning. The laptop becomes a concealed opening through which the entire dynamic range of the concert could be overturned.
That latent danger gives the hour its nervous system. The listener does not simply relax into trains and room ambience because the situation has taught us that any tiny change may matter. A laptop sound can resemble part of the environment until its electronic edge reveals itself. An environmental sound can appear electronically generated until its movement through the room exposes an external source. The distinction between found and performed material keeps dissolving.
Totsuka and Mattin’s computers further complicate authorship because laptops can record, amplify and return sounds already present in the venue. A performer may appear to produce a train when he is actually replaying or feeding back the train the room supplied moments earlier. Mattin has described using the computer’s internal microphone to pick up surrounding sounds and play them through speakers, making the venue increasingly conscious of itself. Under those conditions, the musician becomes less an originator than a switch controlling when the environment hears its own reflection.
This does not eliminate hierarchy. Mattin remained the person deciding when to activate the file or raise the microphone input. The audience’s involuntary cough, chair movement or whispered comment could become artistic material without that person having chosen to perform. Training Thoughts exposes this inequality rather than pretending technology creates democratic participation automatically. Everyone in the room contributes sound, but only certain people are credited, recorded and positioned to decide which contributions return through amplification.
The album consequently turns the audience into an instrument while making that transformation uncomfortable. Quiet concerts generate distinctive social discipline. Listeners become conscious of swallowing, breathing, shifting weight and opening doors. A movement considered meaningless outside the concert can become the loudest event inside it. This awareness may produce communal concentration, but it can also resemble surveillance. Everyone monitors everyone else, and embarrassment becomes one of the forces shaping sound.
The train alone escapes this pressure. It does not lower its volume out of respect for Sugimoto’s guitar and does not wait for a suitably delicate entrance. It follows infrastructure, labor and urban scheduling rather than concert etiquette. Its indifference is liberating. The train demonstrates that the world continues operating outside the tiny cultural ritual occurring at Enban. Musicians may cultivate exquisite attention, but steel, electricity, commuters and public transportation do not require the improvisers’ permission to enter the recording.
This gives Training Thoughts a social reality often absent from recordings of minimal music. Silence can create the illusion of a protected chamber separated from ordinary production, traffic and work. Here the railway keeps puncturing that illusion. Tokyo cannot be excluded from the concert merely because the performers wish to investigate subtle sound. The city’s infrastructure becomes the largest instrument, and its regular return reminds the listener that experimental music occupies real estate inside an economic and technological system.
The cover photograph extends this condition without romanticizing it. Three molded chairs, blue, red and blue, sit empty behind a large window or glass partition. The room looks like a waiting area, station interior or institutional corridor emptied between arrivals. Reflections blur the boundary between the photographed space and whatever stands outside the glass. Nothing visibly happens, yet the picture is full of expectation. Chairs exist for bodies not currently present; windows frame activity occurring elsewhere; architecture waits for use.
The three chairs inevitably suggest the trio, but they also deny the standard image of musical identity. There are no portraits, instruments or dramatic performance photographs. The musicians are represented by empty places. Their most appropriate visual equivalent is not the heroic creator but a seat left available within an environment already functioning without them. The red chair at the center provides the only strong color contrast, though even that difference feels modest rather than symbolic. Three positions, three listeners, three temporary occupants.
One continuous track is essential to the work. Separate titles or index points would transform environmental changes into compositions and encourage the listener to interpret each entrance as a new authored section. The uninterrupted sixty-five minutes preserve the event’s uncertainty. We cannot skip directly to the “important” guitar note without destroying the duration that made it important. Waiting is not dead space surrounding the material. Waiting is the material that gives every later decision its scale.
This makes the album demanding in a way unrelated to loudness or complexity. It asks listeners to surrender the usual efficiency of recorded consumption. A train passes; perhaps nothing identifiable happens for several minutes; another small sound appears. The impatient listener may conclude that the album contains almost nothing. The attentive listener discovers that “almost nothing” is an unstable category crowded with mechanical, architectural and social detail.
The recording quality contributes to this uncertainty. Taku Unami’s mastering does not artificially separate the trio from the room or enlarge the instrumental gestures into conventional foreground events. The environmental field remains sufficiently present that listening becomes an act of continual source confusion. The disc behaves partly as concert document and partly as field recording, without allowing either category to govern completely.
The release on Mattin’s w.m.o/r label also matters. Mattin’s practice has consistently challenged ownership, copyright and the idea that improvised sound should be treated as the protected property of isolated creative individuals. Training Thoughts contains a perfect practical argument against the fantasy of pure authorship. Who owns the train? Who composed the room tone? Does the person replaying an audience sound become its author? Does Sugimoto’s note belong only to Sugimoto when its force depends upon twenty minutes created collectively by architecture, machinery and restrained bodies?
These questions do not make the musicians irrelevant. Their restraint creates the conditions under which everything else becomes perceptible. The trio’s accomplishment lies partly in refusing to claim all available attention and partly in accepting the risk that the resulting recording may seem to contain more railway than recognizable performance. This is a rare artistic courage. Many conceptual works announce the demotion of the artist while carefully ensuring that the artist remains the most interesting presence. Training Thoughts allows the outside world to win.
Yet the trio does not disappear completely. Sugimoto’s notes, Totsuka’s interventions and Mattin’s laptop activity enter as distinct forms of intelligence, infiltrating the environment rather than covering it. “Infiltration” is more accurate than accompaniment. The performers do not decorate the train or improvise illustrative responses to urban sound. They place small foreign materials inside an existing system and observe how perception changes around them.
The album’s finest moments may occur when it is impossible to determine whether that change came from a musician. Once the ear has been trained, every sound seems potentially intentional. The hum acquires structure; the train seems timed; a faint scrape feels composed. This is not because the world has magically become music, but because attention has become suspicious of its own classifications.
Training Thoughts belongs to the history of lowercase and reductionist improvisation, but it also quietly criticizes those categories. A genre can rapidly turn radical silence into another recognizable aesthetic, complete with approved venues, performers, gestures and audiences trained to admire restraint. Mattin’s unpredictable electronics and interest in context prevent the music from becoming a shrine to tasteful quietness. The point is not that soft sound is superior to loud sound. The point is that every situation contains relations of power, expectation and habit that sound can expose.
The record remains startling because it captures three musicians allowing those relations to become more audible than their personalities. It contains guitar and computers, but also public transport, architecture, involuntary movement, anticipation and the social labor of listening. Its hour does not transport us away from the world. It returns the world with its volume relationships rearranged.
By the conclusion, the train no longer feels like an interruption. The musicians no longer feel like the unquestioned center. The room has become an ensemble whose members do not share intentions, techniques or even awareness that they are performing together. A railway system, three improvisers, an audience, a recorder and a future listener occupy one unstable composition.
Anyone who attended the Enban performance or knows more about Yasuo Totsuka’s role and equipment is invited to add detail. The surviving documentation tells us who was credited and where the recording occurred, but the album’s deeper history lives in the room: who moved, who waited, how the trains felt through the walls, and whether anyone present understood that the background was quietly taking over the concert.
Training Thoughts does not teach us to hear silence. It teaches us that silence was never there. Thought passes like a train through structures already vibrating, carrying people and materials whose destinations remain hidden. The musicians wait beside the tracks, place a few sounds into the passing world and discover that listening itself has begun to move.
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