Tori Kudo tested by Reiko Kudo

“20 June 2021 12:12pm”
YouTube/YouTube

Tori Kudo: What bird is this?
Reiko Kudo: I don't know. It’s always on the electricity cable above the parking lot near our house. I only see it from the distance. I wanted you to hear their melodies. I recorded them on the same day.

“20 June 2021 12:29pm”
YouTube/YouTube

T: The end of the sentence has changed.
R: Yes, she makes variations, based on the former one. And there seems to be her melody of the day.
T: She?

“20 June 2021 13:45pm”
YouTube/YouTube

T: There is a call with another bird, maybe a bulbul.
R: Yes! They interact with one another, even though they are of different kind. Our record player is broken again, so I don’t listen to music a lot, I end up watching cat videos if I listen to YouTube, but the birds always sing. My last boom for human song was Kath Bloom.
T: You like Eddie Marcon, don’t you?
R: Yes! Eddie is awesome. I was happy to find out we were looking at the same unknown flowers and trees and cacti.
T: Sometimes I see the flowers, sometimes I don't.
R: Sometimes I hear the birds and sometimes I don’t. It’s like she keeps knocking, but I’m not listening. Only after a while I notice that she had been singing for me, too. A gift.
T: She?

Namio Kudo
“Seven Times”
YouTube 2012

T: It’s [son] Namio’s. When was this?
R: It was after he had a hard time. This is my jewel. He gave his songs to us and his friends.
T: He's singing about the evening cicada.
R: And himself. I wonder why evening cicada stirs certain emotions in me.
T: They’re only in Japan, aren’t they? Even the evening cicada in Amami or Okinawa already has a different sound.

Reiko Kudo tested by Tori Kudo

Bunsuirei
"Yoake No Semi (Cigale À L’Aube)"
From First Gig (Tall Grass) 2021

R: That’s evening cicada! How I love them! But they are becoming few in numbers. It’s great this person could record it so clearly and so many of them! He likes cicadas!
T: He is one of my few younger friends. This track is put between the other songs.

David Carson & The Little Wolf Band
“Ballad Of The Twisted Hair”　
From Medicine Songs (Raven) 1992

R: That cricket one you were crazy about some years ago.
T: Yes, I had been focusing on this melody with the band and on the piano. I was really into changing the pitch of bird and insect sounds.
R: It had such an impact on you! You had calculated how many times each sound is to be slowed down, by comparing its life span to a human one. But I wonder where that idea came from, I think they sound great as they are.
T: It’s a kind of epistemology, you know.

David Dunn
"Chaos And The Emergent Mind Of The Pond"
From Angels & Insects (¿What Next?) 1991

R: This is beautiful.
T: Oh you like noise.
R: It’s calming.
T: There is a study on using this kind of sound instead of insecticides. I would like to try it in my field.
R: You are working hard these days in the field. I’m looking forward to eating buckwheat you harvested. But let’s cut the weeds first.
T: Weeds!? There are no weeds in the world.

Subscribers to The Wire can read the Invisible Jukebox each and every month via our online archive, where you can also find David Keenan's 1998 piece on Maher Shalal Hash Baz and Alan Cummings’s 2008 feature on Reiko Kudo.