The ”Variations” is based on the theme of Shigeru Matsui's idiosyncratic book of poems, ”The Voice of Time", which is composed entirely of onomatopoeia (onomatopoeia and mimetic words).　Not only are "variations" applied to the poetry reading through various electronic modulations, but the sounds of doors, railroad crossings, and even the letters of the original text are superimposed on the text, which is stripped of its meaningfulness and further superimposed on the meaninglessness of the text.

Description:
　'Variations' is a musical form that takes an existing or original musical theme and transforms it in various ways. This work, "Variations on a Theme by Shigeru Matsui", is not a piece of music, but a variation on the theme of Shigeru Matsui's poetry collection, "The Voice of Time". "The Voice of Time" itself is based on the idea of a variation, so we can call it a variation on a variation.

　"The Voice of Time" is based on a sound source edited from concrete sounds recorded by Shigeru Matsui using an IC recorder, which someone else listens to with an earpiece while imitating the sound with onomatopoeia, and then records the voice. Another person then transcribed the recordings into a pseudonymous manuscript, which Matsui then edited and completed, an elaborate production technique similar to that of a complex message game. In addition, the published poetry collection is not printed with words as is usually the case with books, but is a work of art, in which the poems are printed on huge panels, photographed, and laid out like a photo book. For the publication of the poems, another stage of "variation" process was undertaken.

　In "Variations on the Themes of Shigeru Matsui," Matsudaira recorded seven poems from "The Voice of Time" as he recited them, and processed them in various ways using patches made by max, and the video footage of doors and railroad crossings taken by Matsudaira with his iPhone and superimposed on the video footage of the recitations, creating a somewhat strange "variation" process. The piece is composed around polyphony. In some sections, I used a polyphony of auditory and visual images of the original poem as a background for the performance (this video processing itself can be interpreted as a variation).
　The title of each section is the title of the original poem that was used as material for the variation. Only the opening "Voice of Time," which is a presentation of the theme, is a reading of the original poem itself, and the other poems (which roughly follow the order of the poetry collection) have some kind of "variation" in them. In a normal variation, a single theme is played in several ways, but in this piece, each of the themes is juxtaposed with a single variation and an unrelated "Interlude for Doors" is inserted, thus the "variation" form itself is changed.

Structure of the piece:

Subject: The Voice of Time
First Variation Sound Cleaning
Second Variation: Fear Zone
Third Variation: The Man Who Chased Too Many Burdens
Fourth Variation: Manhole 69
Fifth Variation: A Place to Wait for
Interlude for Doors
Sixth Variation: The Abyss


(Translated with www.DeepL.com)