Sukora
Tower

MANUAL OF SOUND: FIRST AND ONLY ISSUE. SHHHHH

Sukora, the architect of silence, descended upon our sleeping heads. Leave the busy centers, hide in the basement (the attic will do just fine too) of a farmhouse lost in the countryside and listen. Listen to what? Nothing. Insert "Tower" into the CD player and don't curse if the stereo emits no vibration. It's not broken. "Tower" started with a spell.

"Tower" is nothing. And when I say "nothing," I'm not joking. "Tower" contains no sound, no note, no song. "Tower" is silence.

And, as a mockery, I can only call poor Suroka incompetent, since I love Japanese music and expected an album of epic, rarefied, innovative sounds, like much of alternative and avant-garde Japanese music. And what do I find instead? Nothingness.

And nothingness scares me. Oh yes. It overwhelms me. It throws me into a river and drowns me.
And I would never have known how ambiguous silence could be. The fact is that "Tower" is a nature-joke album, perfect for chic bourgeois intellectual meetings and vaguely snobbish. You pull it out of your leather briefcase and boast about how much you loved its ellipses, even without having listened to it. Because it's an album that ALL of us have listened to, even unconsciously. You've listened to it without having bought, downloaded, or burned it... You've listened to it without even knowing it. And that's why it scares you, but it will undoubtedly make you interesting to those who love nothingness. The vacuity that creeps into the ears and destroys them. And in the end, we find ourselves deaf and smiling, watching the sunset.

But criticizing "Tower" is like criticizing silence itself and thus the conception of life, the most disturbing sound ever. So what do I do? Do I destroy an obvious joke or praise the attempt to break the lines of an artist (?) who wanted to amaze, devastate, and surprise? I do the math between 5 and 1 and slide "Hot Rats" by Frank Zappa into the player, without asking myself at all why no one knows Sukora and why the cover of such an album is untraceable.