Ken Ueno, Karen Yu, The Up:Strike Project & ADRUNNOGNT - Ken Ueno: Wavelengths (2025) Hi-Res

Ken Ueno's creative approach to composition shares an affinity with the percussion world; there is an underlying spirit of experimentation, problem solving, and deconstruction as a path to innovation that guides them. This clear eyed perspective on the materials of sound and their possibilities makes percussion music an ideal forum to hear Ueno's work. The works on this recording share an interest in microtonality, transformation of noise timbres into pitched material, and an investigation of instrumental possibilities.

One of the core concerns in Ken Ueno’s work is examining the transformation of timbres, from noise to pitch, from obscurity to clarity, from sparseness to density. No instrument category is better suited to the austerity of this kind of sonic inquiry than percussion, and percussionists have consistently been key allies of Ueno’s throughout his musical life. Ken Ueno’s work is both intensely focused on those characteristics that capture his interest, while remaining broadly inquisitive with respect to where he might find new sources of inspiration. One finds Ueno excavating diverse spaces in academic, experimental, DIY spaces, always armed with an openness and wonder about the fundamental nature of sonic experience and how he might explore it in his next project. Wavelengths is a collection of four of his works, three of which are for various percussion instruments, and one for his own voice with sampled electronics, highlighting Ueno’s sensitivity not only to timbral modulation, but also his aesthetic convictions about temporal evolution and how it is manifested in the structure of his pieces.

Wavelengths for solo vibraphone and sine tones opens the album, written for and performed by percussionist Karen Yu. Ueno uses sine waves, played by small speakers placed onto specific bars of the vibraphone, as a vehicle to explore and expand upon the vibraphone’s equal temperament. The acoustic beatings produced between the sine tone and the played vibraphone notes, a variable that Ueno further manipulates by making subtle changes to the sine tones, also become sources of rhythmic extrapolation that are developed in the performed vibraphone part. The vibraphone motor also plays a role in this pattern of stretching and relaxing tension in the piece, and later in the work, performed sounds are recorded and played back through another set of speakers, creating multiple layers of self-referentiality and subtle pitch interaction. Splashes of arpeggiated harmonic color animate the grinding acoustic foundation that Ueno steadily manages in this hypnotic work.