japanese sound art

Comparing bits and pieces of Japanese sound art I've encountered lately, particularly on the lowercase sound 2002 compilation (see also Wired's article Whisper the Songs of Silence), to Western art of the same genre, it seems there's some truth to the cliche that Japanese culture treats negativity (i.e., silence, non-being, etc) fundamentally differently than we do. Next to the Japanese pieces, the European and American pieces seem sometimes overdone -- something could have been said much more simply and effectively, but it wasn't. Quiet sound art, more than just about any other art I'm aware of, seems ephemerally suspended in a sort of emptiness or void; part of both its quaint charm and its arresting, vertigo-inducing power lies in the thinness and near-transparency of the veil its places over that emptiness. Nevertheless, some of the Western pieces strike me as not so much ignorant of the emptiness as a sort of smoke-and-mirrors show intended to distract from it. Consider Toshimaru Nakamura's "nimb #20" (you can hear a bit in the Wired article), which consists solely of unedited feedback from a mixing board. Silences punctuated by a few humble yet mysteriously intriguing tones. What's curious to me, as a Westerner, is that the silences, the empty spaces, are no less interesting than the tones, nor do they exist for the sake of adding dramatic tension. They simply consistute another "voice", a natural counterpoint to the audible sounds. While I will not claim that Western music never uses silences in such a way, I think that, more often often than not, silences in Western aesthetics are used to heighten the sense fullness or presence we receive from what we do hear. A dramatic pause. The calm before the storm. A solitude to be broken. A frame around the subject. By contrast, pieces like "nimb #20" don't seem to presuppose an essential opposition between silence and sound, negativity or positivity, emptiness or presence. The "frame" is no less interesting or present than the subject, and the subject is no more interesting or present than the frame. To suggest otherwise is to creatively misdirect attention, to suspend our mindfullness of the emptiness underlying everything for the sake of entertaining an illusion of impossible fullness of presence. Which is ok, I suppose, so long as you -- and your art -- aren't seduced into believing it.