Quit Smoking Monday

''Memories of the urban space of Tokyo are deeply rooted in the city's initially overwhelming aural ambience. Rather than smell or look, it is the distinctive way the city sounds that can bring prickles of nostalgia to ex-residents. Toronto based composer Sarah Peebles captures some of the kaleidoscopic richness of the aural environment on her reissued 108 – Walking Through Tokyo At The Turn Of The Century (Post Concrète CD) Peebles recorded a week's worth of journeys across the city in late December 1999. While she is intensely aware of the cyclical and periodic rhythms that underlie the city's sounds, this is very much the sound of a single season and a single moment in time, as fast food joints hawk millennium fries and a rare Christian evangelist threatens commuters with fire and brimstone.

Peebles's journeys took her east from the youthful, neon skyscrapers of Shinjuka to the older, downtown areas of Nippori and Ueno. The sound profile thus moves from the garishly synthetic textures of hectoring jingles from electrical shops and the pop-techno metallic cascades of pachinko parlours to the more humanly grounded rhythms of market hawkers, kendo practice at dawn and a temple bell chiming 108 times to mark New Year.

Between each evocatice street scene, Peebles masterfully creates a palpable sense of the joy of motion through urban spaces – the solid pnematic hiss of the doors on the JR trains, station jingles and the learned nasal twang of a streetcar conductor. Christie Pearson's street photos on the enhances CD add another dimension to an exquisitely sequenced piece of audio verité.''

WALKING THROUGH TOKYO AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY