about the record

Audio-visual artist Raimund Wong and unboundaried composer Suren Seneviratne present their debut album on Kit Records. Interweaving folk, ambient and free improvisation, A Record of Living Beings playfully confronts traditional instrumentation such as khæn, shakuhachi, voice, taishogoto, and cello with live tape processing and esoteric '90s software.

The AROLB ensemble began life as Raimund’s freeform collaborative radio show, named after Akira Kurosawa’s existential epic Record of a Living Being. Guests included Yoshino Shigihara, Maxwell Hallett, Clive Bell, Dominic Kennedy, and Francesca Ter-Berg.

By 2023, the ensemble was invited to support TENGGER at Cafe OTO. During rehearsals, Raimund and Suren laid the foundations for free expression, threading a narrative between instruments with magnetic tape, dub manipulation, and Suren's vast collection of rare and obsolete Macintosh music software from the '90s and early 2000s.

Taking cues from the cross-cultural subversion of Yellow Magic Orchestra and Geinoh Yamashirogumi's score for Akira, which augmented large gamelan and choral ensembles with MIDI computation, A Record of Living Beings documents a borderless ensemble spinning dialogues around 'otherness' and the fracturing of cultural and personal identity.

Like the radio shows they grew from, these recordings are optimistic and convivial: a primitive quilt of real and imagined memories, voices, and futures, converging to harmonise in humid space.