AYA/OYO “Poe” CDR (Kirigirisu)

Shunsuke Tsurumi, the philosopher, once wrote about the creative process of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe, who loved his drink, would descend through multiple layers of consciousness as he drifted into sleep, encountering flashes of inspiration along the way. At those moments, he would pinch himself to crawl back to the surface of consciousness and record the traces of his memories. It is like a process of retrieving, piece by piece, the remains of an ancient civilization submerged in the deep sea.
We release collected performance sounds and environmental sounds into a sea of electric circuits. The sounds scattered at the bottom are stirred by manipulating knobs and swinging meters, beginning to circulate through multiple layers of worlds once again. Then, they resurface in new forms. We indifferently record the whereabouts of those sounds.
Just as Tsurumi once called such an act “Poe in reverse.”AYA\OYO is a unit by multi-instrumentalist Shoichi Iwamoto and electronic musician k.odk, both based in Okayama, Japan. Conceived in the summer of 2025, they exchanged audio files via email and released “ABU” in July of the same year. Following this, they are now releasing “Poe,” which includes additional recordings made with field recording microphones. This EP consists of two patterns: one where their individual performances are combined as they are, and another where the recordings are performed through electronic processes. Both are improvisations with no edit.

Text by Shoichi Iwamoto