SVEN WUNDER
WABI SABI
A1 Yūgen
A2 Shinrinyoku
A3 Hot Winds Arrive
A4 Hanami
A5 Komorebi
A6 Blanket Fog Descends
B1 Wabi Sabi
B2 Bamboo and Rocks
B3 Kachōfūgetsu
B4 Onsen
B5 North Wind Rattles the Leaves
By welcoming the beauty of imperfection and simplicity, Sven Wunder applies the timeless
wisdom of wabi sabi on this musical journey. What you can hear is filtered through Ukiyo-e
(which translates as “pictures of the floating world”), which illustrates everyday life, as well as
through Japonism, the study of Japanese art, and more specifically its influence on European
works. The result is a surface that creates an illusion through sound. The infusion of Min’yo
with jazz-rock, this hazy scene evokes the landscape of Monet’s ”The Water Lily Pond”, which
depicts the painter’s Giverny garden, with a Japanese bridge, bamboo, ginkgo trees, and the
reflection of the sky in the pond. This illusion constructs both time and space.
The surface of the music, like the canvas of the painting, invents a journey between now and
then by interpreting the idiom of folkloric and western art instruments. In this composition, the
sound of the Western concert flute, which stretches back to the Renaissance and Baroque
periods, evokes the sound of the bamboo flute (”shakuhachi”), which reached its peak during
the Edo period. The guzheng, also known as the Chinese zither, with a more than 2,500-year
history, joins traditional Japanese folk melodies with modern pop percussion and
20th-century electronic instruments such as the Moog synthesizer,
Wurlitzer electric piano, and electric bass.
This is the illusion that celebrates the fleeting nature of all things. A journey. A deep inhale and
a slow exhale. It has a mix of jazz (both funky and progressive), East Asian, and South Asian
sounds. The idea of fusing these styles and reframing them withthe aesthetic of wabi sabi is
to reconnect with nature and concentrate on asymmetries and emphasize ornamentation to
generate new ways of looking at the world, here and now.
