Unboxing Childhood with Taku Unami: On bot box boxes

By Spencer Cawein Pate

One of the universal experiences of American childhood is discovering that it can be more fun to play with a cardboard box than with the toy it contained, and no work of art has ever captured this better than Bill Watterson’s classic comic strip Calvin & Hobbes. In the hands and under the imaginations of the title characters, cardboard is transformed into a time machine, a duplicator, and most famously a transmogrifier. Most of us lose that sense of magic, wonder, and curiosity when we grow up, but thankfully not everyone does–like Taku Unami, whose restless brilliance has elevated him as the reigning trickster spirit of contemporary improvisation. Unami has worked with cardboard boxes for well over a decade, both on record (Motubachii with Annette Krebs, 2010) and in live performances (his September 2011 duo with Radu Malfatti, as documented on ErstLive 012). And now, Erstwhile has released his definitive statement to date in this corrugated medium: the extraordinary bot box boxes, in which three discs are given over to unedited and unmixed realtime recordings of the artist manipulating small robots, newspaper, and cardboard. As Jon Abbey suggests at the above link, the listener should “approach this as a one day Taku Unami festival, three solo sets, recorded by one binaural microphone. if you were in his room, this is exactly what you would have heard.” If you like Unami’s other albums on Erstwhile, especially Teatro Assente (with Takahiro Kawaguchi, 2011) and Parazoan Mapping (with Eric La Casa, 2015), you will love bot box boxes as much as I did. The album is beautifully recorded, like a three-dimensional sound sculpture, with a wide dynamic range and striking stereo separation.

Despite Unami’s undeniable importance within “the area of sound under discussion,” bot box boxes has received few reviews so far, and unfortunately the most prominent to date is a total hatchet job at RateYourMusic. I’d like to take this opportunity to rebut the RYM review at length–it’s not only inaccurate in several places, but also wrongheaded, meanspirited, and reactionary. Let’s start with the inaccurate. The review begins with a historical narrative that is, at best, highly debatable: 

Leaving aside the baffling, unexplained aside about “the emotion of the digital age,” it is not at all clear to me that electroacoustic improv was somehow simultaneously “undeniably primitive” (which is an interesting choice of words–to me, “primitive” seems like something of a class signifier rather than a value-neutral descriptor of technical ability) and “embarrassingly indebted to the academic theory it sneers at” (which is odd, because “academic” and “theoretical” would seem to be in tension with “primitive”). With regard to the latter dig at academia, I’ve felt that print and online discussions of EAI are refreshingly theory-free, apart from arguments about John Cage and allusions to Deleuze & Guattari (a fault of which I am far more guilty than Taku, Jon, et al.); the focus is on aesthetics and affects more than ideas and ideologies. As for the former insult, perhaps Sachiko’s empty sampler, Toshi’s no-input mixing board, and Otomo’s recordless turntable can be considered primitive in terms of their ostensible limitations, but the music they created together was anything but primitive–rather, it strikes this listener as supremely sophisticated, sensitive, and subtle!

But to dilate further on this idea of limitation, I have argued at length (in section II of my essay “Between Thought and Expression: On Creative Improvisation in Classroom Teaching,” in which I invoke the dreaded Academic Theory that I am supposedly both indebted to / sneering at) that the virtual potentialities of any object are literally infinite:

In musical terms, a guitar has six strings that, when played with fingers or a plectrum, produce a set number of notes and combinations of chords. But the full virtual potential of a guitar is not encoded in, and exhausted by, the limits of the actual body, as the virtual is infinite and divergent in its multiplicity, exceeding what the body is constructed or has been evolved to do. Musical imagination, which mediates between the actual and the virtual, is the unlearning and overcoming of ingrained habits of repetition (unconscious or otherwise), producing further real difference as a result (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980). Likewise, the sonic capabilities of a guitar extend far beyond what its body is programmed to accomplish: one can slap or beat on its body percussively, play it with slides or glass bottles or tremolo bars or drumsticks, vibrate its strings with portable fans and electric toothbrushes, jam bits and pieces of metallic hardware under its frets, re-wire it to play alternative musical modes and harmonic scales, distort and bend its tone through pedals and produce feedback through amplifiers, process and loop its sounds with computers and other digital technology, etc. 

I was thinking about Keith Rowe’s guitars when I wrote that paragraph, but I fail to see why it couldn’t just as easily apply to Taku Unami’s cardboard boxes. Both a guitar and a cardboard box are equally endless in terms of their sonic possibilities–one can open, cut, rip, puncture, tape, scrape, or flatten a box; nest, build, collapse, and topple towers and tunnels; drop, toss, or throw boxes back and forth; write or draw on their sides, etc. Jon alludes to the infinitude of Unami’s work when he proposes that “the title ‘bot box boxes’ can also be read as a small section of a library’s card catalog, thus the contents here (3 CDs/162 minutes) represent just a tiny fraction of all of the recordings (potentially) stored there.”

The central fallacy of the RYM review, then, is to treat bot box boxes as a work of reductionism a la the compositions of the Wandelweiser collective (hence the remark about “the edges of silence”). Manfred Werder’s 2003–in which the performer is instructed to play no more than two three-to-seven second tones within the course of one hour–is reductionism avant la lettre. But beyond his choice of material, Unami is not restricting himself at all; rather, he is creating a situation in which he forced to generate novel approaches to acousmatic sound art, just like any solo set by Keith Rowe or Graham Lambkin. (In fact, the closest album to bot box boxes in the Erstwhile catalogue might be the Rowe / Lambkin collab Making A [2013].) Again, to quote my own writing on improvisation: “Deleuze also helps us see that the improvisational act occurs when one explores and extracts the virtual potentialities of a body (such as the aforementioned guitar) from the plane of immanence and converts them into the actual, turning ideas into sounds. As Deleuze and Guattari would put it in their collaborative work (1972), improvisation is a form of desiring-production. Desiring-production figures desire figured not as the filling-in of an intrinsic lack that can never be truly satisfied […] but rather as an adaptive, evolutionary, and above all rhizomatic process of connection and growth, of appropriation and incorporation of the other into the self.”

EAI is about as abstract as music gets, so reviews of it will necessarily be more subjective than those of more figurative music. It’s perfectly acceptable to find albums like bot bot boxes aesthetically displeasing or boring, but the claim that Unami’s work is a “sonic arctic” and “desolation” is pure projection–a tacit admission of the reviewer’s lack of imagination. Where the reviewer hears “vast nothingness,” I find pleasure, joy, surprise, humor, and warmth. Indeed, listening to bot box boxes feels like recapturing the cheerful absorption of openended, nondirected, unselfconscious childhood play, exactly as Bill Watterson depicts in his stories. It’s like a musical analogue of the famous Picasso quote that “it took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Unami, who seemingly never unlearned how to paint like a child, can thus help the listener to unbox one’s inner child from where one sealed and stored it away so long ago.

It’s telling (as in another failure of imagination) that the reviewer makes the remarkably inapt comparison of the album to “unboxing videos” instead of linking it to the ludic principle I’ve sketched above. Unboxing videos are teleological, inherently unfree. Their point is to get to the excitement of the toy contained inside–again, precisely the inverse of the creativity celebrated in Calvin & Hobbes. The box in such a video is to be discarded once its purpose of concealing / delaying gratification has been fulfilled. By contrast, what’s inside Unami’s boxes is not the presence of a toy, nor the emptiness of is absence, but rather the idea of boxness in the multiplicity of its unfolding. The box is not an object but a process. Unboxing videos are a Freudian game of repetition-compulsion, while Unami’s unfolding is a praxis of Deleuzian desiring-production.

We’ve covered why the review is inaccurate and wrongheaded. Now we move to the meanspirited and reactionary:

While I suspect Taku and Jon might be bemused / amused by the reference to “boomer hating hubris,” the appellation of “cowards” engaging in “childish rebellion” is needlessly hostile. For one thing, releasing albums as challenging and rigorous and spare as bot box boxes is an act of bravery, since both the artist and the label are taking an aesthetic and financial risk before what is an exceedingly niche audience. And heaven forbid the musical avant garde ignore culture and reject tradition (as in “the tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living”)! Would not a working definition of musical innovation be the act of drawing one’s own lines of flight away from the dead mass of tradition, the dead hand of culture?

Toward the end the reviewer makes the only partially-accurate claims in the piece–that “Unami is attempting to capture […] organic ecstasy” out of the “deeply human intrigue and desire to hear nice and satisfying sound.” But I fail utterly to hear the despair the reviewer perceives in bot box boxes. (It’s almost as though the review is not a well-reasoned, well-constructed conceptual argument but rather a groundless gripe based purely on a preexisting set of arbitrary prejudices / preferences. The distance from Good Morning Good Night to bot box boxes is not very great at all: to acclaim the former and deplore the latter feels like narcissism of small differences. And it’s very funny to me that EAI-adjacent sound is still effortlessly making people this angry at such a late date.)

I’d like to conclude by expanding on Taku’s artist statement for bot box boxes: “I know some of you are thinking ‘Anyone can do this…’, but in the DIY spirit of doing what anyone can do with what anyone can get, and without any special skills or funds, I tackled improvisation head on, using mostly newspapers and cardboard boxes, which turned out to be this triple CD set.” I think this is a beautiful sentiment in its radical egalitarianism. Conceptual artists are often confronted with the arguments Taku mentions; my mom, for example, is fond of criticizing modern art by reference to the fable of the Emperor’s New Clothes–by which she means that the audience is just politely pretending to admire something, while only a child has the temerity and honesty to point out the emperor’s nakedness. The obvious rejoinder to “Even I could have done this!” is to respond with the same kind of mockery the Unami’s reviewer indulges in: “But you didn’t, did you?” Unami’s answer, however, is kind, welcoming, and participatory (perhaps in another lifetime, he was an amazing art teacher at a Montessori school). When faced with the claim “Anyone can do this…” he replies, “Yes, you can, and isn’t that wonderful?” We should all be so bold in our aesthetics, and so humble in our ethics.