By Eyal Hareuveni
Tom Soloveitzik is an Israeli soprano and tenor sax player and sound artist
based in Paris, who has spent the recent years, his most fertile era, in
Tokyo. He works and researches the materiality and vulnerability of sound -
in its most delicate aspects of resonance and decay -and in an austere
manner corresponding with the experimental, minimalist Wandelweiser scene,
as well as the practice of listening, often as a philosophical kōan dealing
with the inherent imperfection of our lives.
Hannes Lingens / Tom Soloveitzik / Toshimaru Nakamura / Atsuko Hatano /
Naoto Yamagishi - Play (Hitorri, 2025)
PLAY is a game-piece by German, Berlin-based composer-percussionist Hannes
Lingens (of Die Hochstapler quartet) with a set of 100 cards with
instructions for ensembles of any size and instrumentation. The individual
instructions vary from precise to vague, sometimes requiring a high degree
of interpretation, but eventually seek to have as many different sounds as
there are people in the room. The first version of this work was recorded in
Jerusalem (and titled as “Jerusalem”) with a sextet, with Lingens and five
Israeli musicians, including Soloveitzik, in 2022 (Play, Hitorri, 2023).
Soloveitzik, who wrote the liner notes to the original release and knew that
this game-piece resembles practices used in Noh theatre, produced a Tokyo
version of this work on the occasion of the release of the first Play at the
space of Ftarri record store and label in Tokyo in Tokyo in November 2023,
with him playing the soprano sax, no-input mixing board pioneer Toshimaru
Nakamura, Atsuko Hatano on five-string viola, and percussionist Naoto
Yamagishi. The outcome is much longer (80 minutes) than the original
“Jerusalem” version, but it is charged with similar, unpredictable,
enigmatic, and poetic tension. It beautifully realizes Lingens’ vision by
not making things too tight or loose, yet in control and with generous
silences, and thus offering a stimulating space for projection where music
lies between people and ideas.
Takashi Masubuchi / Wakana Ikeda / Tom Soloveitzik / Yoko Ikeda -
Microcanonical Ensemble (Rombed Visions, 2025)
The Microcanonical Ensemble is Soloveitzik on tenor and soprano saxes,
Takashi Masubuchi on acoustic guitar, Wakana Ikeda on flute and harmonica,
and Yoko Ikeda on violin and viola da gamba, all associated with the Ftarri
label and its faithful circle of experimental musicians. This acoustic
ensemble echoes the minimalist music of Morton Feldman, Jürg Frey, and the
composers of the Wandelweiser scene. The three extended pieces weave subtle
paradoxes, balancing stasis and movement, delicate interplay between sound
and silence, resonance and decay, improvisation and composition. The
thoughtful yet austere sonic images, often employing the simplicity of one
note, suggest slowly changing landscapes that transform like the seasons,
and melt into a seductive and intimate, rippling sound. These reductionist
pieces were partially captured at the Ftarri shop and venue, and are
performed with patience, grace, and restraint, stressing the essence of
human imperfection.
Tom Soloveitzik & Microcanonical Ensemble - two waves, drawn on paper
(Sawyer Spaces, 2025)
two waves, drawn on paper is Soloveitzik’s composition for the
Microcanonical Ensemble (and dedicated to it), and recorded at the banks of
the Tama river (which divides the greater Tokyo area into Tokyo and Kanagawa
prefecture), in November 2023. Soloveitzik employs the intimate, delicate,
and minimalist dynamics of the Ensemble to reflect and mirror his own
feelings and thoughts as a visitor - and a stranger - but being part of a
place, still, completely unimportant to the surrounding instances. Or, being
present in the field - literally - of infinite occurrences, musical and
otherwise, and by deep listening, absorbing the place in the most physical
sense. Soloveitzik wanted him and the Ensemble to take part in this endless,
transient cycle around the Tama River, exploring unseen and unpredictable
relations, blending in, and “being played by it”. The album was released by
American composer Kory Reeder’s label, Sawyer Spaces, focusing on art and
place: the intersections of experimental music, field recordings, and
soundscape.
Sun Yizhou / Tom Soloveitzik - Light Industry International Co. (Ftarri,
2025) + Yinshan Pagoda Forest 银山塔林 (Presses Précaires, 2025)
Two sound art adventures of Soloveitzik and Chinese, Beijing-based young
conceptual and sound artist Sun Yizhou, both were recorded on the same day,
in March 2024.
Soloveitzik toured Beijing and Shanghai in late March and early April 2024
and had a recording session with Sun Yizhou (credited with noise floor and
audio cables). Light Industry International Co. features three pieces - a
brief one and two extended ones from the studio session. Soloveitzik’s
ethereal, whispering, and meditative tenor sax resonates and is extended by
Sun Yizhou’s subtle, noisy electronics, and both sounds are punctuated by
numerous silences of changing lengths, but sound perfectly attuned to each
other. This austere architecture of reductionist sounds is intensified by
the cover artwork, an original image from the iconic Radford's Architectural
Drawing (1912).
The Yinshan Pagoda Forest (银山塔林) is a sacred Buddhist site near Beijing from
the Liao (916-1125) and Jin (1115-1234) dynasties, and was one of the "Eight
Views of Beijing" - the picturesque and historically significant sites in
and around Beijing - during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1912)
dynasties. Soloveitzik recorded three sparse, ethereal solo sax solos in
this historical site, and was answered on the other four pieces by Sun
Yizhou, credited with “jumping, clapping, shaking, and atmospheric radio
receiver”. Sun Yizhou offers a completely different perspective of the
historical site from the meditative and reserved one of Soloveitzik, one
that is clearly distant and detached, punctuated by sudden percussive and
mechanical noises.
Tom Soloveitzik - 麻布 diaries (Aloe, 2024)
麻布 diaries - Azabo diaries, titled after the Azabo neighborhood in central
Tokyo where Soloveitzik has lived. 麻布 also means linen in Chinese, as Sun
Yizhou, who released the album by his label, Aloe, told Soloveitzik. This
album documents Soloveitzik’s daily solo practice between November 2022 and
December 2023. The music is quiet and subdued, focused and with great
restraint, but intimate, intriguing, and nuanced. Soloveitzik is blending
in, absorbing, and responding to the small space vibrations. The saxophone
becomes an abstract sound generator that shifts air in transparent densities
and different material states. The last piece, “[蔵王温泉] thousand eyes”, is a
field recording from Zao onsen, a popular ski resort north of Fukushima,
where Soloveitzik placed the recording machine inside the sax bell, making
the instrument a witness to a completely surprising social phenomenon,
including the background playing Paul Desomnd’s ballad, “The Night Has a
Thousand Eyes”..
Tom Solovietzik - Views from the Seven Ionian Islands (Suppedaneum, 2025)
This album borrows its title from Edward Lear’s 1863 visual travelogue, and
began with the Soloveitzik family's visit a decade ago to the Greek island
of Kythira. The images, sounds, and memories from this island resurfaced
during Soloveitzik’s trip to Japan, so he concluded that these Views, which
kept moving between the present and the past, are embedded in his life. This
realization led Soloveitzik to think that the “best recording is the memory
of listening, of the image(s), of contact, and of change”. He quotes Marcel
Duchamp’s epigraph that captures the elusive essence of this work: “One can
look at seeing: / one can’t hear hearing”.
Views from the Seven Ionian Islands focuses on our ever-evolving perception
of the past and present, and what are the nuances that distinguish past from
present, near from far, and memory from perception, or perhaps, most
importantly, the person one once was from the person one has become,
especially in a world increasingly characterized by a profound sense of
dislocation - geographic, temporal, moral, aesthetic, and political. This
philosophical, meditative work consists of two suites. The first, a
six-movement contemplative one with a nine-musician ensemble recorded in
Jaffa in August 2023, and the second is a series of fifteen field recordings
made in 2015 in Kythira, interwoven with brief, abstract interludes. It is
accompanied by a book with Soloveitzik’s impressions of the island, a
conversation with painter Masha Zusman, who relocated to the island, and an
essay on the work by the writer and composer Derek Baron.
