Living Distances by Yumi Iwaki & Ryan J Raffa

On Living Distances, Yumi Iwaki and Ryan J Raffa come together to share their unique visions of movement and place.
On Side A, Iwaki guides us through the upper reaches, with each track seeming to describe some specific region of clouds and how we might get there. Twinkling arpeggios traces lines over breathing seas of drone in tracks like MidAir and Dots, and in Spiral Flow the listener feels propelled upwards across descending latitudes like in some Escherian grid. Contrasting movement, myriad destinations, Iwaki’s compositions present us with a rich, multidimensional map of places we can only visit in dreams.
On Side B, Raffa outlines a journey across more earthly terrain, where washes of white noise and static lap against our feet (SF Dreams); where struck metal rings out through uninhabited valleys across which beautiful dream-beasts gallop towards the horizon (Correlation); and where friends walk, hand in hand, through a checkerboard landscape of sunlight and shade (Hands Whistle). In Wonder Wander, we are spirited away to an imaginary shore, where the wind and waves swirl across the stereo spectrum, a pebbled beach crackles pleasingly between our toes, and seagulls soar overhead. Taken as a whole, Raffa’s side of Living Distances seems less like the map to the places our heart longs to visit and more like the diary we would keep once we arrived.

Tracklist

1.	Yumi Iwaki - MidAir	4:57

2.	Yumi Iwaki - Dots	4:05

3.	Yumi Iwaki - Spiral Flow	5:01

4.	Yumi Iwaki - April	3:52

5.	Yumi Iwaki - Esora	4:55

6.	Ryan J Raffa - SF Dreams	8:34

7.	Ryan J Raffa - Correlation	2:54

8.	Ryan J Raffa - Hands Whistle	3:23

9.	Ryan J Raffa - The Last We Spoke	1:57

10.	Ryan J Raffa - Wonder Wander	8:36

Videos

Credits

released September 18, 2020

All music by Yumi Iwaki and Ryan J Raffa

Mastered by Taylor Deupree
Artwork by Alëna Olasyuk

Muzan Editions
Cat.No.MEDS 046
Summer 2020

License