In Otsuchi, a disconnected public telephone booth called the Wind Phone allows visitors to speak grief aloud, and tens of thousands have used it as a pilgrimage. Portland-based experimental cellist Ted Laderas created the album Marginals as a series of mourning calls, with each track serving as an elegy to a specific calamity such as the Vajont dam landslide and the Tunguska explosion. The album frames remembrance as a means of survival and appears on Beacon Sound, a label dedicated to sonic experimentation. Laderas balances music with work in bioinformatics and organized mental-health focused Ambient Zoom sessions during the pandemic.
In the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan's Tohoku region, a resident of the small town of Otsuchi opened a public telephone booth in his garden. Inside, a disconnected phone invited visitors to speak their grief aloud, carrying on the wind painful stories that would be near-impossible to let rest anywhere else. Since the installation of this Wind Phone, tens of thousands have made the pilgrimage to pick up the receiver and dial into the void.
On his new album Marginals, Laderas crafts his own mourning calls. Each track is an elegy referencing a specific calamity, some well known, others more obscure. With a little research, one can surmise that tracks Vajont and Tunguska respond to the 1963 Vajont Dam landslide in Italy and the Tunguska explosion of 1908 in Siberia. Whether the events are familiar or not, the feelings they stir are universal.
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