“……The music I love most right now is a preview of ‘Ombrophilia’, the debut album by my friend Tomoko Sauvage, due from Seattle label and/OAR later this year. Ombrophilia means ‘an abnormal love of rain’. Tomoko uses wooden cooking spoons to strike and stir Chinese porcelain rice bowls filled with water. The wobbly, chiming vessels turn tuned water into a sort of natural synthesizer, complete with organic forms of envelope, modulation, pitchbend and decay. Tomoko captures the gloopy, ringing sonorities with subaquatic mic probes, then feeds the result through digital processing. Track titles like “Amniotic Life” reveal that she’s drawn inspiration from the fluid sounds of her recent pregnancy – her own internal ‘waters’ and the new life moving within them.

This is super-quiet music, filled with something sweeter and sexier than rock’s morbid, normative love of pain. When Tomoko plays it live, water dripping from a pierced polythene bag hung from the ceiling not only adds a kind of random percussion, but scatters reflections off the lit water surface across the walls and ceiling. The result is soothing and sensual, like a long hot bath. I could soak in it forever.”