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Takahiro Kawaguchi/Utah Kawasaki, "Amorphous Spores"
Listening to Amorphous Spores, it’s difficult not to think about sex. The title alone implies it. Spores are generally vehicles for asexual reproduction, and while that isn’t technically sex, it is at least related in that it is a method for securing growth and repetition over time. But Takahiro Kawaguchi and Utah Kawasaki chose to place mushroom caps on the cover of their album and many members of the Fungi kingdom can reproduce either asexually or sexually. The method utilized depends on the environment. In conditions favorable to a mushroom’s continued existence, spores are produced by mitosis. As genetic replicas of their parent, the spores simply germinate and continue the species over and over again, no partner required. When conditions aren’t so favorable, however, mushrooms go through a more complicated process involving cell fusion, the production of a zygote, and meiosis. It still doesn’t make sense to think of males and females (the gametes all look the same), but since the resulting spores are not clones of their parents, their offspring stand a better chance of surviving environmental changes. The newly mixed genetic material might, for instance, secure them a tolerance to drier climates. Though it would be a stretch to say that what they’re doing is sexual, Kawaguchi and Kawasaki also work with morphologically similar germs, "selfmade instruments" and "electronics" according to the slim liner notes. They begin as quantifiably distinct bodies, fuse, interact, and disperse, finally producing hybrid offspring. Although it’s a strange and unlikely symmetry, the structural and extra-musical content of the album point toward the similarities in fungal mating and creative collaboration.
In getting to those similarities, it may be enough to point out that Amorphous Spores is shaped like a bell curve. The intensity, volume, and density of the record’s five parts can all be mapped to that form, expressing a movement from calm and stability to disturbance and volatility, then rapidly back to calm again. The circularity fits all of those reproductive graphs passed out in college biology classes and, appropriately, matches the shape of the mushrooms depicted on the album’s cover. Were the music a perfect representation of the progress from mycelia to basidiocarp and so on, each stage in the life cycle of the fungus, maybe the one in the artwork, would have an audible equivalent, and the whole project would be a representational work of art, a very strange translation of the procreative act to the realm of sound.
In all likelihood, that is not what Kawaguchi and Kawasaki had in mind when making their record. For one, the title is not Spores, but Amorphous Spores, suggesting shapeless and apparently unorganized elements colliding at random, not hyphae with cell walls and nuclei undergoing plasmogamy. Whether the duo hits the mark in that respect depends on which part of the music is supposed to be amorphous. Kawasaki’s electronic instruments and Kawaguchi’s homemade contraptions are all designed, and if they had wanted to they could have provided diagrams showing everyone how those instruments were built and how they function. For that reason, and because no such diagrams are present, they seem like poor candidates.
On a simple level, all of their sounds are also formal, vibrations of a particular size and shape, presented in a perfectly appreciable and ordered way, passing through a medium. That’s a murkier path to travel and probably just as unhelpful anyway. The obvious uncertainty at play is the interaction of the instruments and the noises, of the buzzing fan motors, synthetic bursts, and horn-like peals that spin and gurgle endlessly through the album’s middle portion, and of the heavy low-end drones Kawasaki lays down at the extremes, the seismic foundations for Kawaguchi’s curt interruptions. These interact, exchange properties, form structures, then fade away, recurring and resounding at the microscopic level from moment to moment, and at the generational level as the album loops back on itself in its final seconds, cutting a path toward its beginning.
How these parts relate, what they produce, and ultimately where they lead all depends on how the sounds are received. Beyond the big picture of repetition and diversification the inexhaustible matter of translation awaits. That’s where the sexual activity promised by the album’s title enters the equation. Electronic vibrations and organic receptors fuse, interact, and disperse, setting off a chain reaction. The process can end there, in the pleasure of repeitition, or it can spin off in any direction whatsoever, germinating in the minds of others.
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