There is something wonderfully suspicious about an experimental album built from toy instruments. One expects whimsy, perhaps a charming detour into nostalgia. Imu Plastos quickly reveals that this expectation is exactly the trap. Carl Stone and Asuna take the sonic debris of childhood, feed it through layers of real-time sampling and digital transformation, then return it to us so thoroughly mutated that it feels less like remembering a toy box and more like discovering an alien civilization that learned music from discarded plastic objects.

The collaboration brings together two generations of Japanese experimental music. Carl Stone, often described as one of the pioneers of computer-based sampled composition, emerged from the American experimental scene before relocating to Japan, where his work has continued to reshape ideas about repetition, digital manipulation and the musical potential of found sound. His influence on contemporary electronic composition is immense, though he has always worn that status lightly, preferring curiosity over canonization.

Asuna (Asuna Arashi) arrives from a very different but equally singular trajectory. Known internationally for his extraordinary “100 Keyboards” performances, he has spent years constructing immersive environments from toy keyboards, small electronic devices and objects that most musicians would overlook while searching for more respectable equipment. Respectability has never produced particularly interesting music anyway.

Their first meeting at an experimental festival in Kanazawa in 2024 apparently generated an immediate creative loop. Asuna played more than a hundred toy instruments, samplers and synthesizers; Stone sampled and processed those sounds in real time; Asuna then captured Stone's transformed material and fed it back into his own system. The process resembled two mirrors facing each other, except the reflections were made of squeaking plastic, fragmented melodies and digital ghosts.

The studio album preserves this feedback architecture while pushing it into stranger territory. The most fascinating conceptual twist lies in the editing: the sampled and processed sounds are often presented before the original source material, reversing the usual relationship between object and sample. Cause and effect become delightfully unstable. One hears a strange electronic texture, then later encounters the toy fragment from which it was derived, as though the future were retroactively inventing its own past.

The track titles, all anagrams of Carl Stone & Asuna, are more than a clever puzzle. They mirror the album's entire methodology, where sounds are continuously rearranged, recontextualized and turned inside out. Imu Plastos itself combines a linguistic root connected to taking or sampling with another related to plasticity and toys, encapsulating the record's central obsession with transformation.

Musically, the album is remarkably varied despite its tightly constrained source material. The opening “Casual Resonant” functions like a brief orientation ritual before “Nascent Arousal” begins introducing the duo's peculiar sense of rhythm, where tiny percussive fragments seem to stumble into complex patterns by accident. The centrepiece, “As Aural Consent”, unfolds over nearly eleven minutes of constantly shifting textures, moving from almost cartoonish melodic fragments to dense, shimmering electronic swarms that feel simultaneously playful and unsettling.

What makes Imu Plastos particularly compelling is its refusal to choose between humour and sophistication. The toy origins of many sounds remain audible, and the album clearly enjoys their inherent absurdity. Yet beneath the surface lies an intricate exploration of temporality, memory and digital mediation. Stone's sampling practice has always treated recorded sound as malleable material rather than documentary evidence, while Asuna's world of inexpensive electronic objects challenges hierarchies between serious instruments and mass-produced noise makers.

The result often feels like listening to a parade that has wandered off its planned route and discovered a hidden dimension behind the fairground. “A Salsa Nocturne” hints at dance music without ever fully becoming dance music, while “As Toucans Learn” creates the delightful sensation that tropical birds have enrolled in a seminar on granular synthesis. Even the more contemplative pieces, such as “A Nacreous Slant”, retain a sense of curious movement, as though every sound were still deciding what it wants to become.

Lawrence English's mastering deserves particular praise for preserving both the microscopic detail and the surprising warmth of the recordings. The album could easily have become a brittle exercise in digital complexity, but it remains tactile throughout, full of tiny mechanical imperfections and resonances that remind us these transformations began with physical objects.

Room40 has long specialized in releases that blur boundaries between composition, improvisation and sound art, and Imu Plastos fits beautifully within that catalogue while maintaining a distinctly eccentric identity. It is experimental music that does not mistake seriousness for solemnity. Stone and Asuna understand that wonder is often a more radical artistic strategy than austerity.

Perhaps the album's greatest achievement is that it makes sampling feel mysterious again. In an era when digital manipulation is ubiquitous, Imu Plastos restores the sense that recording and transforming a sound can still be an act of discovery rather than routine production. By the end, one begins to suspect that every forgotten toy in every attic might contain an undiscovered electronic universe waiting for someone curious enough to press the right button.