AUBE / Blau/Rot
[AATPDIFFICULT]
Released by aufabwegen, May 2007.
7″ record, limited edition of 500 copies, clear vinyl, full colour sleeve.
Running time: 13:00 min, 500 copies in full colour sleeve, clear vinyl, 33rpm
Available: standard edition: 6,00 Euros, special handnumbered & signed edition: 8,00 Euros

On these two tracks, released for the first european tour by AUBE in eight years, Akifumi Nakajima worked with an old Roland SH-12 percussive synth. The result are two long tracks (each over 6 minutes) with a nice floating mood that sometimes changes into aggressiveness without losing its warmth. A great little record by one of the most important experimental musicians from Japan.

A Biography of Akifumi Nakajima / Aube
The music that Akifumi Nakajima has been creating under the name of Aube can be expressed as „electronically generated organic music“. Aube was designed as a sonic generative unit under a creed; only sounds arising from one limited material are used for constructing one musical piece. Each material is seen in our daily life or even inside ourselves: Water, fire, air, earth, stone, ice, can, metal, wire, glass, fluorescence, glow-lamp vibration, clock, bloody pulse, heartbeat, brain wave, respiration. These just reflect topics in his past sonic adventures, and would never prohibit the use of different materials in future. Through his fraternization with the nature of these materials, he seemed to learn the way to „dance“ with their imagination in his brain through meditation about them. In such a process, his music turns to absolutely relaxed and enjoyable sonic stimulus with „neurobeat“ in spite its experimental nature. The novel entertainment from Aube has been accepted in numbers of countries in the world through releases and distributions of his sound products and actual live performances.
Here, a brief description of Akifumi’s history is presented for further appreciation of the beauty of Aube music. Akifumi was born in Kyoto, on January 1959. Throughout his life in the past, he has spent his life at the city where the beauty of Japanese tradition has been maintained. He was interested in the creation of objects, especially in the alteration of aspects of original materials through modification techniques. He had so skillful technique to construct plastic models in the precise way as he got the premier prize in a contest for people to build plastic models of tanks. Simultaneously, he loved the alienation to create novel figures through combining parts from different sets pf models. It is not difficult that his sense of alienation in plastic models casts its shadows before sonic manipulation in Aube.
He has finished the division of product design in the post-graduate course of the Kyoto University of the Art in 1983. During the period in the university, his has interested in some specific types pf music, so called avant-garde, industrial, noise, computer-operated music. Especially, German electronic music in the 1970�fs and industrial music in the 1980’s attracted him. Although the combination of music attracting him was rather „typical“ as Japanese listeners of underground music, he responded to such stimuli with his own way. He was self-educated to use synthesizers and personal computers for the construction of favorite music for himself.
He moved his action from the individual to the public level. As a phenomenon, he has been involved in „Artistic Scene“ in the beginning of such a transfer. In 1990, he was requested to create music in conjunction with an installation using water as materials. The contemporary artist who gave the stimulus to Akifumi was his friend. Then, he used sounds of water as parts for constructing his electronic music in return to the friend’s demand. The occasion was the initiation of collaborative performance with contemporary artists in various exhibitions, and his first audio cassette „Water 1990“ was sold out in the first exhibition.
In 1991, he set a solo-noise project Aube under the creed described above. Apart from the collaborative art exhibitions, he himself as a sonic designer began to play live music at clubs. This change in his attitude resulted in robust interchanges with various noise artists in Japan and all over the world. His works, in which sounds arising from each limited source were manipulated through sampling and analog/digital processing, ranged from the ambient to the harsh area in the noise field at the time.

In 1992, he founded own cassette-only producing label G.R.O.S.S. to publish works by himself and others from various countries. G.R.O.S.S. cassettes were accepted well in the world due to the musical quality and excellent packaging by Akifumi as an industrial designer. During 6 years, the period that G.R.O.S.S. was active as a cassette label, 59 cassette albums were published. Now G.R.O.S.S. returned as a label for publishing CD-Rs. The CD-Rs by Aube were released from the year of 2000, and distributed in U.S.A., Germany, Netherlands, France, U.K. and other countries.
In the history of Aube, the collaboration with Op.Eklekt, a theatrical and dance-oriented contemporary performance duo, should be noticed. In 1992, Akifumi began collaborate with them, and a video clip from their collaboration has been recorded in an issue of „Oh! Moro“ compilation from „Maru ka Batsu“ in Osaka, which featured a bunch of Japanese noise.

Aube has never hesitated to be hybridized with other musicians as a unit. You should notice his collaborative sonic units; Club Skull, Kinkaku-Temple, Ginkaku-Temple, Gokuraku-Temple, SIAN, Loop Circuit, Hyper Ventilation, Meiji-Shrine, Ise-Shrine, Heian-Shrine, Atsuta-Shrine. Akifumi has been appreciated through contributions to works by other artists through mixing and/or remixing of sounds and designing their packages.

Aube has released numerous discs since the CD „Flood Gate“ created through constructions of water-originated sounds on Vanilla Records, Kyoto, Japan in 1993. Seven inch single disc „Aquatremble“ arose from water sounds again and released from Stomach Ache Records in Mexico/U.S.A., next year. Perspectives of Aube works, including its prolific participation to compilations in world-wide level, would be recognized in the separate discography. Akifumi contributes to package designing of almost all releases. Furthermore, note that Aube has been invited to various festivals and events in the Europe and the North America. The activity of Aube is absolute expression of hybridization of Japanse traditional sense of beauty, the perspective to the fraternization between material and mental world and the electronic culture.