AMPLIFY 2008: light
Kid Ailack Art Hall Tokyo, Japan September 19 (Friday) Katsura Yamauchi solo Keith Rowe/Taku Unami Ami Yoshida/Toshimaru Nakamura September 20 (Saturday) Mitsuhiro Yoshimura solo Sachiko M solo (contact mike only) Keith Rowe solo September 21 (Sunday) Keith Rowe/Sachiko M Katsura Yamauchi/Mitsuhiro Yoshimura Keith Rowe/Toshimaru Nakamura 3000 yen per night co-curated by Jon Abbey and Yuko Zama ---------------- In September 2008, legendary guitarist Keith Rowe played four sets in three nights in the AMPLIFY 2008: light festival in Tokyo. The festival marked Rowe's fourth trip to Japan in his 40+ year career and the first time he was able to work closely with so many Tokyo musicians on their home turf. As the only non-Japanese participant in the festival, Rowe took the opportunity to both move his aesthetic towards his collaborators (in the duo sets), as well as to make a strongly contrasting individual statement in his solo set, which he later titled 'Cultural Templates'. All four of those sets are now available in the ErstLive series: the premiere meeting of Rowe and Taku Unami; the aforementioned 'Cultural Templates', Rowe's first solo set ever in Tokyo; the premiere meeting of Rowe and Sachiko M, as part of the double CD 'contact', and now the concluding set to the festival, Rowe's duo with his long-time partner Toshimaru Nakamura, completing the tetralogy. AMPLIFY 2008: light was an intense and deeply immersive experience for all who were lucky enough to be present, and quite a bit of that was attributable to Rowe's four sets, which are now available for all to hear. concert photos |
REVIEWS
Mark Flaum, Paris Transatlantic
AMPLIFY 2008: light
September 19th – 21st 2008, Kid Ailack Art Hall, Tokyo
AMPLIFY 2008: light, the sixth festival in the Erstwhile Records AMPLIFY series, took place in the last days of summer in Tokyo's Kid Ailack Art Hall, a black-box style theatre space with no stage and room for an audience of perhaps 40. Co-curated by Erstwhile's Jon Abbey and his wife Yuko Zama, the festival focused on the Japanese scene, with the notable addition of British guitarist and Erstwhile mainstay Keith Rowe. The Tokyo improv scene is one of the major axes of the electro-acoustic improvisation world, and was my personal gateway into this area of music at the beginning of this decade, through the work of Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura. Their ability to draw out intimate, tender sound from such severe sources has been extremely influential on my listening habits, and this isn't the first time I've traveled to hear them perform. The chance to hear them both in their home country, solo and in collaboration with Keith Rowe, one of the elder statesmen of the improvisation world, was too great to pass up, not to mention the bonus of seeing musicians less often encountered outside of Japan: Ami Yoshida, Taku Unami, Mitsuhiro Yoshimura, and Katsura Yamauchi. So I took my first trip to Tokyo, half expecting some brave new insight into the origins of the Tokyo improv sound. And I did have some interesting listening experiences before arriving at the festival itself – John Cage meets Sun Ra on the stereo of a tiny café, crows calling through the raindrops in the park in Kichijoji, a road crew digging their way through concrete at a dance floor rhythm, a politician crackling with distortion as he addressed a massive crowd in Shinjuku – but nothing that evoked the subtle energy of the music I came to Japan for, and found in Kid Ailack Art Hall.
DAY 1
The first set of the festival was a solo saxophone performance by Katsura Yamauchi, who's been part of the free jazz and improv scene in Japan for a while but has only recently made forays into collaboration with electronic improvisers, including work with the Swiss Signal Quintet and a duo with Mitsuhiro Yoshimura. He started on alto, with long, breathy phrases that allowed pitch to creep in towards the end. The whispery multiphonics combined well with the gentle tones, but after a brief pause he began adding rhythmic valve-stops that turned the piece into a pulsing, chord-cycling sort of Club Med drum circle. He tried a couple of other approaches, including one that began with hard-nosed free jazz bluster, but seemed to realize they weren’t leading anywhere and stopped. His second piece took off in a much more satisfying direction, a double-toned drone that resonated throughout the room, vibrating the space and creating a delicate abstract series of pulses in the inner ear. For the last piece, Yamauchi switched over to his sopranino and flurried up to a similar strong drone, which, though just as interesting, seemed somewhat unnecessary, as if he was only continuing so as not to leave the sopranino untouched for the night.
The Keith Rowe / Taku Unami duo that followed was one of the festival highlights. Rowe's work should be well known to most readers here, though it’s worth mentioning that he arrived in Tokyo with a new guitar, different from the instrument he used on his latest solo album The Room. Unami brought a guitar as well, a weirdly-strung double-necked acoustic monster, and also a mandolin, but his instrument of focus was his computer-controlled set of small motor devices mounted on plywood on the table before him. Rowe focused on scratching and scraping the strings of his guitar with a metal sponge, a butter knife and a hand-held fan, creating sounds full of texture, which he amplified into bursts of noise as the moment required. He also had his laptop onhand, apparently running Reaktor as a CPU load to start the miked automatic fan, and using the mouse directly on the keyboard to generate sympathy between the sounds. The thick drone foundation, something of a Rowe trademark over the last few years, was nowhere to be heard – interesting because Unami’s instrument in some ways assumed that role. Though the control system Taku was using through his laptop was not visible, he was able to determine when his devices would operate and at what frequency they would spin, and affect the power distribution manually, as well as changing the timbre slightly by adjusting the position of the plywood. The mode of interaction between Rowe’s focused scratches and Unami’s robotic spinning motors was intriguing, with Taku assembling frames around Keith’s noises, then breaking them down into pauses, which Keith built into or crushed through as fit the moment. In addition, Unami occasionally reached down and strummed the guitar or the mandolin to add a touch of color, somewhat similar to what Rowe has done in past performances. Overall, it was a vibrant and surprising set full of challenge and respect.
The final set of the first night was a duo of two Tokyo mainstays, no-input mixing board innovator Toshimaru Nakamura and vocalist Ami Yoshida, and was in fact the first time the two had played together. Yoshida was very much to the forefront, both sonically and physically, and her focus was impressive, eyes closed with her whole attention devoted to placing her next sound. Working somewhat in spurts, her voice was so fragile it seemed to waver between breaking into a moan and disappearing completely. With each breath she seemed to lose her place in the room, and needed a few moments to find her way back in. Nakamura, on the other hand, was constantly active yet subtle, building through a number of careful drones, some pure tone sinewaves, others fuzzier and more noisy, as if to coax Yoshida gently, spiking up through her silences and warming around her sounds. In a way, it came off as Nakamura playing accompanist to Yoshida, who kept the audience rapt both with her striking sounds and the physicality of her performance.
DAY 2
The second night of the festival was devoted to solos, the first featuring Mitsuhiro Yoshimura. Something of a newcomer on the scene, with only two recordings available on his own (h)ear rings label, his performance consisted of placing a microphone in the room space and manipulating feedback through a pair of headphones. How he did so during this particular set wasn’t obvious, since he was performing in near darkness, headphones held low in front, almost motionless. The sounds he created were largely continuous narrow tones of feedback – feeling like a throwback to the early days of so-called onkyo, when sinewaves were the focal point of many performances – which he modulated, releasing bursts and spikes of noise at each transition, as if he had to relinquish control of the sound momentarily in order to change it, before pulling it back into a drone. The tones were pleasing, filling the room precisely or buzzing quietly to themselves, but the spiky transitions between them detracted from the experience for me, and came across more as lapses of concentration rather than conscious decisions.
The second set was one I was most looking forward to: Sachiko M soloing without her mainstay sinewaves. Using just contact mics – four of them and a mixer on a table in the corner of the performance space – a sound source she'd apparently not touched in some three years, it was very much an exploration, a discovery of exactly what her tools were in performance, moving the microphones carefully around the table to produce pops, scrapes and wheezes, rubbing them with wires and fingers to create gentler sounds, and pressing them against the table top to subtly modulate the background hiss. Every action felt as haphazard as it was necessary, in a performance with all the dramatic tension Yoshimura’s set had lacked.
Like his duo with Unami the night before, Keith Rowe's solo performance moved away from the foundation drones that have characterized much of his work. For this show he selected extracts from four pieces of baroque music – the slow movement of a Marcello oboe concerto, two motets by Cassanea de Mondonville, and arias from operas by Rameau and Purcell – which he played from his iPod in a pre-determined order. Even though, as he explained later, the pieces had very specific connotations – one represented profundity, another death – in performance he made no attempt either to interact with or respond to them. Instead they created an environment in which other, separate music occurred. The laptop was now closed, though the steel wool, butter knife, and electric fan still figured prominently, their scrapes and rumbles supplemented by the music and captured radio signals – fiery spikes, careful whispers, erratic rhythms of distant chatter and crosstalk – played from a headphone into the guitar which served as an antenna. It was a unique departure from Rowe's past solo performances – reminiscent perhaps of his duo with Julien Ottavi at ErstQuake 2 in September 2005, which ended with both musicians walking offstage and classical music playing on quietly on a spotlit radio – and one that also recalled Graham Lambkin’s Salmon Run, in which the listener is invited to listen as much to the musician as to what the musician is hearing. Making use of recorded music in the context of an improvised music festival might seem slightly subversive, but it provided valuable and subtle insight into the way Rowe himself listens, and the way we listen.
DAY 3
The third night began with the duo of Sachiko M and Keith Rowe, who set to work at once with his scrabbling and scraping, making heavy use of the metal sponge, and doing something with a charcoal pencil that sounded a little like digging through light gravel (resulting in something looking almost architectural on the worksheet he had laid out beneath his guitar). Once more, the laptop remained closed. I was reminded of Jeph Jerman’s work with crumbled leaves and branches, though Rowe had no organic material visible on his table. Sachiko returned to her more familiar sinewave generators, working in a vein closer to her Salon de Sachiko (IMJ), with pops, spiky beeps, and only occasional extended high frequency tones. She extended her palette of sounds by loosening the wires between the sine generators and moving the generators themselves around. It was fascinating to see her bring some of the technique she showed with the contact mics to her sinewave performance, something she hadn't done in June last year when I saw her in Houston. The interaction between the performers was intricate, if somewhat oblique, with Rowe’s careful textures providing an ideal staging area for Sachiko’s sudden sounds. Perhaps the most charming moment of the festival was the moment the two of them made eye contact with the almost simultaneous realization that the set was complete, and broke into broad smiles.
The next set was for me the least successful. Mitsuhiro Yoshimura and Katsura Yamauchi provided the only performance that really set acoustic instruments against electronics. No longer in the dark, Yoshimura took to the side of the stage to control the feedback from his room microphone. His performance this time was stronger than his solo set, more serene but also more confident, holding the sounds longer and transitioning between them more smoothly and carefully. Yamauchi, on the other hand, did not live up to the set which had opened the festival. Instead of finding a focus and exploring it alongside his playing partner, he seemed merely to run rapidly through his sonic vocabulary, as if searching for the right sound to match Yoshimura's drones. Hurrying through squelchy burbles, breathy half-valved notes and clacky flurries of finger sounds, he ended each phrase with a rushed, loud intake of breath that bookended his sounds in a way that didn’t seem at all appropriate. As a display of technique it was interesting, but he didn’t stumble upon anything that met Yoshimura’s sine tones until the very last moment, when he came up with a gorgeous multiphonic whisper that filled the spaces around the narrow tones with vibrant texture. Unfortunately he elected not to explore that particular sound further, and the set came to a natural end soon after.
The festival concluded with a performance by Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura, a duo active for much of the past decade. This was their first show together since 2006, and both seemed very excited to be playing together again, picking up at once with high energy and fierce charge, crashing through noisy bursts, sputtery swirls, and spikes of high and low frequency waves. Rowe clearly demonstrated that his new table of equipment was more than capable of piling up the characteristic thick textured foundational drones, which Nakamura matched with blustery bubbles and pops, sharp high frequency stabs and crunchy drones of his own. It was somehow appropriate that a festival subtitled "light" should close with such heady intensity.
And so came to a close the sixth AMPLIFY festival, and the second to take place in Tokyo. The first was back in 2002, subtitled balance and documented in an Erstwhile box set. Whereas that event served as a broader encounter between European and Japanese improvisers, and a showcase for Erstwhile (nearly all of the participants and most of the groupings having already appeared on the label), only one of the duos at AMPLIFY: light, Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura, had recorded previously for Abbey's imprint (on 2001's Weather Sky, a live set included in the AMPLIFY 2002: balance box and 2005's between). Three of the festival's seven participants have yet to appear on Erstwhile. AMPLIFY: light was both more focused, and also more speculative – several of the duos are expected to release records in the near future, some with their first recording sessions planned for the week following the festival. One reason for this is that the maturity of the music has permitted a somewhat riskier program, without concern that the musicians won't find the delicate balance of contrast and complement that Jon Abbey has always provided as a label manager and festival curator. And that balance was certainly achieved, if anything more confidently than in the 2002 festival. Additionally, the great understanding of the Tokyo improvisation scene that Yuko Zama added provided this year's festival with a deeper connection with both the musicians and their performance space. The performers seemed quite comfortable with their new partnerships and the risks they were taking, a feeling which crossed over to the audience and provided me with the most intimate and absorbing series of performances I have ever attended. –MF
AMPLIFY 2008: light
by Yoshiyuki Kitazato, erstwords
Over three days in which a typhoon struck Tokyo, the U.S. label Erstwhile which Jon Abbey runs with his wife Yuko Zama held a festival: AMPLIFY 2008: light, consisting of solo and duo performances of Japanese musicians and Keith Rowe. Rowe, known as a British avant-garde guitarist who invented a unique method of playing tabletop guitar and bowing guitar strings, was the main performer of the festival. The subtitle of the festival "light", which hints at a light seen in the future music, was Yuko Zama's idea, to dedicate the event to the late music critic and her mentor Toshihiko Shimizu who passed away in May 2007. This event can be noted as a unique experimental music festival, which reflected the label owner's personal vision directly into the selection of the performers, similarly to the recent IMJ's "ftarri" festival which Yoshiyuki Suzuki curated. I think that both of these events should be more appreciated by listeners, considering the fact that the label owners take a risk of bearing all of the expenses personally to realize the festivals.
There were several interesting aspects in the AMPLIFY 2008 festival: to be able to listen to Keith Rowe's 3-day live performance, who had come to Japan only three times previously, with AMM and other projects; as a pure practice of global interaction of improvisers that is meant to be always open beyond national boundaries; to witness what can be seen when the Japanese improv scene, which can be defined as "post-Off Site" movement after Onkyo in Japan, is set in a frame of experimental music from a different perspective. There was also an interesting aspect to interpret the label owner's vision as a criticism against the current improv scene through the festival.
Although Rowe played on all three nights, all of the possible combinations of musicians were not presented in the festival. Taku Unami, Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura were the only musicians that played with Rowe, all in duos. Katsura Yamauchi played solo saxophone (the only traditional instrument seen in the festival) to open the festival, as well as a later duo with Mitsuhiro Yoshimura. The howling voice performer Ami Yoshida played only once, in a duo with Toshimaru Nakamura on the first night. Mitsuhiro Yoshimura, besides the aforementioned duo with his frequent recent collaborator Yamauchi, also did a solo performance, which for me evoked Sachiko M's early experimental sine wave work.
Since the program was formed only with solos and duos as mentioned above, the festival did not have so much possible variation that could be easily expected from this rather big event with 7 performers for 3 days. This simplicity must reflect the curator Jon Abbey's aesthetics. Except Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura who seemed to play the role of mediators of the whole festival, the other musicians tended to use minimal styles to segment one tone into details. This unique nature of AMPLIFY allowed an open space for the sounds to reach listeners' perception directly, Onkyo sounds dancing in our heads, without taking on a nature of festivity (of a village party, if I dare to say) which is common to most music festivals.
The "Onkyo sound" in this context can be likened to a tightrope act, walking on a wire in the air. A circus high tightrope walker forces the audience to fix their eyes on the single point on the wire where he is stepping, and the tension increasingly rises. In order to make the most of each moment, he dares to risk his life by choosing the uncomfortable, dangerous situation. If a tightrope walker falls off the wire, he cannot try it again. It is a one-shot deal, and the moment of bliss will never come back. Among the musicians who were "walking on a tightrope" of the festival, the most extreme example was perhaps Ami Yoshida's voice.
Howling voice requires difficult control to attain fragile tones from a vocal cord that is unstable itself, since vocal cords are affected by the performer's physical condition each day. It is almost beyond human control and perhaps even sometimes more difficult than what the performer themself might expect. Since Yoshida does not use any electronics devices to alter her howling voice, it is even harder to control. Also, listeners naturally tend to hear the howling voice as a human being's "voice" rather than "acoustic sounds", even though the performer insists that they are simply considered to be acoustic sounds. This is perhaps because our brain’s networks are not formed to listen to human voices in that way. In fact, our ears cannot listen to a voice as simple acoustic sounds separate from the person whose voice it is. A voice performer cannot play her voice just like playing an instrument, since the voice more directly represents the performer – in this case Ami Yoshida herself.
The vibration of Ami Yoshida's vocal cords that stems from the deep place where her body and mind connect can also be described as peering into the darkness at the edge of her spiritual cliff. Toshimaru Nakamura's performance wrapped around her performance with a structure of figure and ground appropriately. For Ami Yoshida's voice that has no landing site without any supporting context, Nakamura offered a stable chair on which Yoshida could stay in the air safely. If we use another metaphor from the circus, Nakamura put up safety nets like a spider's nest in the air. Nakamura chose his sounds to let Yoshida’s performance have all the space she needed without disturbing her voice at all. Compared with Ami Yoshida and Gozo Yoshimasu's first duo performance that I saw several months ago, which assumed a crisis-like character, I could see that Yoshida and Nakamura had already established their own methodology despite this being their first duo set ever. Nakamura's skill as a mediator should be more highly regarded.
In a way, the 6th AMPLIFY festival which was held in Tokyo was already structured in advance by the qualities of the seven musicians performing. In general, musicians who played with the limited/alternative method sometimes referred to as ‘reductionism’ were Katsura Yamauchi, Taku Unami, Mitsuhiro Yoshimura and Sachiko M. Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura also played their instruments to make sounds within this reductionist aesthetic, but that does not mean that they used the same sounds in every set. They changed their sounds in each set to deal with the different environments, which means that they did not restrain their performances to one limited style of improvisation. Rowe and Nakamura did not play like tightrope walkers who walk on a wire. They appeared as performers who conveyed various layers of music behind each separate performance. They had always prepared several ideas for which direction to go or what to choose. This quality of these two musicians must have led them to be mediators of the festival. I understand why the festival was concluded with their duo set.
Perhaps we can draw a borderline here. Some people may criticize some of the paths that Rowe and Nakamura chose as a retreat to the old-style improvisation, which might also mean a defeat of the Onkyo movement against the established nature of free improvisation. However, I do not think that it is creative to be reductionist simply for the sake of reductionism, and ignoring the various circumstances of each occasion. That would be just dogmatism. In the end, the only thing a musician can do is to be true to their own quality that they are destined to deal with for their entire life.
Among the musicians who worked in the reductionist style at AMPLIFY, the ones whose sounds stemmed from their own flesh and blood with no electronics use were Katsura Yamauchi and Ami Yoshida. Apart from the content (see footnote #1 for explanation of this term) of the music, they seemed to try to reach somewhere beyond the modernism of improvisation, and yet this also resulted in appealing to the layers of history of human memories. This happened because they presented voice and instrument on stage in a traditional way.
While there are sounds that are generated from electronics devices with no direct connection to human memories, there are other sounds which dig into the core of the human body and reach the depths of history just like finding a new layer of ore. In the junction of the tabula rasa state of neo-futuristic electronics music and the ancient memories of human beings, we experience a confused sense of time when we hear the sounds. Possibly our modernist method of dealing with time collapses when forced to deal with this kind of approach. In any case, whether the performer's body is actively involved with the performance or not (the fact that it is related to the oral airway like vocal cords or breathing is very important here) is a point, and we can draw another borderline here.
Here, Sachiko M showed up to destabilize the borderline. We may call the performances of Keith Rowe, Taku Unami, Toshimaru Nakamura and Mitsuhiro Yoshimura with an old term live electronics. But Sachiko M's contact mike performance, in which she seemed to play closely with her sense of touch and not just actively involving her fingers with the performance, was different. Just like she picked up sine wave from a sampler, her contact mike performance is based on her intentional misuse of dealing with it like a scrap, not using it as acoustic equipment. She played this recording device, which is supposed to keep silent for the sounds to be recorded, like an amplification device. The contact mike is played to make sounds based on reality, totally free from any memory, while being closely related to her physical being - especially to her sense of touch that can be called cognition of fingers.
Our sense of touch is closely related to our own memories. But it has nothing to do with music in general and is related to different sensations from sounds, such as a pleasurable feeling to touch a lover's skin or a finger to touch a fruit in the kitchen to check how ripe it is. Using contact mikes, Sachiko M established her performance to interact with listeners through a coupling of sense of touch and memories, not by means of a coupling of acoustic sense and memories. She focused the spotlight on the entanglement of subject and object that arises at the birth of sounds, by entwining her fingers on and off the contact mikes, not only with focusing the texture of objective sounds, but also with the cognition of fingers.
On the other hand, the physical senses that sustained Katsura Yamauchi and Ami Yoshida's performances involved the layers of history of human memories, which could sound romantic to some listeners. But the physical sense of Sachiko M is always sliding within a highly aware realm, sticking to complete realism. Her self-definition of "I am not a musician" should be regarded as a key phrase in this context, deeply related to this specific performance.
Just like Derek Bailey used to do, the festival's key musician Keith Rowe seems to fold the layers of several generations of improvised music history into his performances with his background as a long-term musician. He may appear to be a tightrope walker on the surface, but what he played was a live electronics improvisation that could be regarded as a translation act of putting his memories into electronics sounds. It was impressive that he was willing to move towards his co-performers such as Taku Unami, Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura to open a space for dialogues, setting aside his own firm aesthetics that he has built with AMM over many years. It was not like he was donating his time and energy for co-performers from younger generations as a master of free improvisation, but instead, he was genuinely trying to communicate with them with an open mind by paying careful attentions to the environments, always starting fresh with a clean slate in each set. I can tell that this open heart of welcome style of approach made it possible to organize radical improvisation orchestras like MIMEO.
In his solo set, Rowe added some samples of old classical music to realistic electronic sounds that were close to the original style of noise music, occasionally using a portable fan which evoked a propeller noise. The old-world feeling of the sampling and noises that Rowe brought in the performance seemed to be overlapped with his own old memories. In fact, he mentioned that a propeller noise evokes the noise of air raids to him, as he spent his childhood in the midst of wartime. As seen in this fact, Rowe's improvisation is defined with his multilayered experiences and consciousness beyond simply the typical boundaries of 20th century experimental music. This is why his music is performed with infinite disparity every time he plays, even without co-performers and even in this time of the “avant-garde” concept losing its value.
If Ami Yoshida and Katsura Yamauchi are trying to pull something from the old layers of history of human memories that are beyond their own individual consciousness by lowering down their resonant sonde deep into the core of the body - or the central information center of the body. (Of course, it does not mean that they can always reach the old layers of history by exploring their subconscious area every time they play.) On the other hand, Rowe's way of presenting the memories is quite bibliographical. Here is another explanation: Rowe's work table where his guitar rests is just like his study room where his books for reference are piled up high, and his improvisation is performed just like writing a text on brand new paper. However, his performance is not directly descriptive, like expressing his wartime experience with actual sounds of strafing. Instead, he uses indirect sounds such as a propeller noise as an implication, like writing a poem. Perhaps Rowe began the process of performing music on his worktable during the time of AMM. If so, perhaps Rowe is putting elements of his performance on his table one by one, whatever it is Onkyo or reductionism, just like reading a new book. He may not understand some parts instantly, but after reading it repeatedly, he may get it just like filling additional writings between lines.
Needless to say, none of his co-performers, who were walking in a straight, focused line using reductionism-style improvisation, spent their time cultivating their own workspace to collect miscellaneous elements during their sets. Compared with Rowe who was playing like a writer, every co-performer seemed to play much more simply without walking too far from themselves in a text-independent environment. Of course, this was why listeners were able to concentrate on their sounds and be free from the excessive information overflowing in this post-modern time, and could experience the total picture of being, via this self-limited improvisation performance style.
Accordingly, the limited/alternative style of improvisation represented by reductionism seems to be the approach that remains most in actual practice, in spite of various recent attempts to deconstruct the established conventional improvisation performances. For those simple styles of performances, it does not matter if the music is considered a paradigm shift in the history of improvised music or not from a macro viewpoint. Improvisers from the older generations have built their own specific identities by polishing their skills playing free music, to eventually stand on stage as experts of instrumental performance. However, to reach the state of reductionism, they have to abandon their established identities. There were musicians like Derek Bailey who had tried to expose the origin of performance by returning to simple styles of music without abandoning their own expertise.
A reductionism musician tries to make the audience observe the moment when his new identity is constructed each time, instead of reconstructing his identity that was already established at some point in the past. It should remind the audience of the pure methodology of improvisation with which the musician convinces the listeners that the performance is born in this moment, without originating in the past. Perhaps only someone like Keith Rowe – who not only has an open mind of hospitality, but also who can reset himself every time he plays while having a history of being a constructive improviser - is able to show empathy for this new style of Onkyo reductionists. In Rowe's flexible behavior during AMPLIFY 2008, I saw a rare nature that is difficult to find in the U.S. and European improvisation scenes where pushing one’s own identity to the forefront is usually believed to be a virtue. Perhaps Rowe is trying to practice nomadism in the free improv scene, which the late German musician Peter Kowald had been pursuing, too. I understand well why Jon Abbey of Erstwhile values Rowe highly.
Like John Zorn did in the past, Jon Abbey considers the Japanese improv scene to be crucial, and held his label festival in Tokyo for the second time. He considered Keith Rowe as the main performer, included the remarkable mediator Toshimaru Nakamura as an advisor, included avant-garde idols Sachiko M and Ami Yoshida (not every listener may be able to enjoy their performances, but their presence is important to remind of the fact that experimental/improvised music does not belong to only men) to document their current activities, and included Taku Unami, Katsura Yamauchi and Mitsuhiro Yoshimura as new voices in the scene.
The festival covered a broad range of performances. Katsura Yamauchi presented his European approach using limited/alternative improvisation style by using breathy tones often. Mitsuhiro Yoshimura kept letting out continuous sound like sine wave on and on by using feedback noise of headphone/microphone in a darkened room - it was impossible for the audience to see how he played. Keith Rowe and Taku Unami's duo presented unique installation-style electronics music using a contrast of the speakers' location, with an indistinct combination of their sounds making it hard to distinguish who played which. Ami Yoshida inclined the audience's mind to her howling voice, which created a charged atmosphere in every moment. Sachiko M adhered to her own acoustic realism with an unparalleled contact mike solo performance. Keith Rowe and Sachiko M's duo sounded like solo plus solo rather than a duo performance. There was a duo of Yamauchi and Yoshimura. Then at the end, Rowe and Nakamura presented aggressive duo music like a rock in which Rowe returned to his drone performance.
The curators said that one of the most important purposes of having this festival in Tokyo was to realize the duo of Keith Rowe and Sachiko M. Rowe admires Sachiko M's performance, in which she looks into her self and simply digs deep into the core of her being, as one of the most influential musicians for him. It sounds like the most accurate understanding of Sachiko M's music. In the field of the Onkyo music or limited/alternative improvisation, it seemed that only general theories dominated without considering discrete theories enough for each case so far. That was why Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura have often been mentioned synonymously with Onkyo music. What we need to try is to reconstruct the diversity of music with a fresh approach each time by setting the origin of sound in the 'here and now’ (especially for improvised music) in the field of music criticism, too.
*1: I call it "content" here for convenience, but it might be almost impossible to interpret Ami Yoshida's voice which sounds like a murmur of an unborn baby who is about to become a human being, or Katsura Yamauchi's breath which changes a horn into somewhere like a cave exposed to the wind. These sounds can barely be explained by anomalies of conventional saxophone or voice performances. These sounds seemed to be born without being related to any conventional way. How to describe these sounds is a big issue for us.
(translation by Yuko Zama)
AMPLIFY 2008: light
by Yoshiyuki Kitazato, erstwords
Over three days in which a typhoon struck Tokyo, the U.S. label Erstwhile which Jon Abbey runs with his wife Yuko Zama held a festival: AMPLIFY 2008: light, consisting of solo and duo performances of Japanese musicians and Keith Rowe. Rowe, known as a British avant-garde guitarist who invented a unique method of playing tabletop guitar and bowing guitar strings, was the main performer of the festival. The subtitle of the festival "light", which hints at a light seen in the future music, was Yuko Zama's idea, to dedicate the event to the late music critic and her mentor Toshihiko Shimizu who passed away in May 2007. This event can be noted as a unique experimental music festival, which reflected the label owner's personal vision directly into the selection of the performers, similarly to the recent IMJ's "ftarri" festival which Yoshiyuki Suzuki curated. I think that both of these events should be more appreciated by listeners, considering the fact that the label owners take a risk of bearing all of the expenses personally to realize the festivals.
There were several interesting aspects in the AMPLIFY 2008 festival: to be able to listen to Keith Rowe's 3-day live performance, who had come to Japan only three times previously, with AMM and other projects; as a pure practice of global interaction of improvisers that is meant to be always open beyond national boundaries; to witness what can be seen when the Japanese improv scene, which can be defined as "post-Off Site" movement after Onkyo in Japan, is set in a frame of experimental music from a different perspective. There was also an interesting aspect to interpret the label owner's vision as a criticism against the current improv scene through the festival.
Although Rowe played on all three nights, all of the possible combinations of musicians were not presented in the festival. Taku Unami, Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura were the only musicians that played with Rowe, all in duos. Katsura Yamauchi played solo saxophone (the only traditional instrument seen in the festival) to open the festival, as well as a later duo with Mitsuhiro Yoshimura. The howling voice performer Ami Yoshida played only once, in a duo with Toshimaru Nakamura on the first night. Mitsuhiro Yoshimura, besides the aforementioned duo with his frequent recent collaborator Yamauchi, also did a solo performance, which for me evoked Sachiko M's early experimental sine wave work.
Since the program was formed only with solos and duos as mentioned above, the festival did not have so much possible variation that could be easily expected from this rather big event with 7 performers for 3 days. This simplicity must reflect the curator Jon Abbey's aesthetics. Except Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura who seemed to play the role of mediators of the whole festival, the other musicians tended to use minimal styles to segment one tone into details. This unique nature of AMPLIFY allowed an open space for the sounds to reach listeners' perception directly, Onkyo sounds dancing in our heads, without taking on a nature of festivity (of a village party, if I dare to say) which is common to most music festivals.
The "Onkyo sound" in this context can be likened to a tightrope act, walking on a wire in the air. A circus high tightrope walker forces the audience to fix their eyes on the single point on the wire where he is stepping, and the tension increasingly rises. In order to make the most of each moment, he dares to risk his life by choosing the uncomfortable, dangerous situation. If a tightrope walker falls off the wire, he cannot try it again. It is a one-shot deal, and the moment of bliss will never come back. Among the musicians who were "walking on a tightrope" of the festival, the most extreme example was perhaps Ami Yoshida's voice.
Howling voice requires difficult control to attain fragile tones from a vocal cord that is unstable itself, since vocal cords are affected by the performer's physical condition each day. It is almost beyond human control and perhaps even sometimes more difficult than what the performer themself might expect. Since Yoshida does not use any electronics devices to alter her howling voice, it is even harder to control. Also, listeners naturally tend to hear the howling voice as a human being's "voice" rather than "acoustic sounds", even though the performer insists that they are simply considered to be acoustic sounds. This is perhaps because our brain’s networks are not formed to listen to human voices in that way. In fact, our ears cannot listen to a voice as simple acoustic sounds separate from the person whose voice it is. A voice performer cannot play her voice just like playing an instrument, since the voice more directly represents the performer – in this case Ami Yoshida herself.
The vibration of Ami Yoshida's vocal cords that stems from the deep place where her body and mind connect can also be described as peering into the darkness at the edge of her spiritual cliff. Toshimaru Nakamura's performance wrapped around her performance with a structure of figure and ground appropriately. For Ami Yoshida's voice that has no landing site without any supporting context, Nakamura offered a stable chair on which Yoshida could stay in the air safely. If we use another metaphor from the circus, Nakamura put up safety nets like a spider's nest in the air. Nakamura chose his sounds to let Yoshida’s performance have all the space she needed without disturbing her voice at all. Compared with Ami Yoshida and Gozo Yoshimasu's first duo performance that I saw several months ago, which assumed a crisis-like character, I could see that Yoshida and Nakamura had already established their own methodology despite this being their first duo set ever. Nakamura's skill as a mediator should be more highly regarded.
In a way, the 6th AMPLIFY festival which was held in Tokyo was already structured in advance by the qualities of the seven musicians performing. In general, musicians who played with the limited/alternative method sometimes referred to as ‘reductionism’ were Katsura Yamauchi, Taku Unami, Mitsuhiro Yoshimura and Sachiko M. Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura also played their instruments to make sounds within this reductionist aesthetic, but that does not mean that they used the same sounds in every set. They changed their sounds in each set to deal with the different environments, which means that they did not restrain their performances to one limited style of improvisation. Rowe and Nakamura did not play like tightrope walkers who walk on a wire. They appeared as performers who conveyed various layers of music behind each separate performance. They had always prepared several ideas for which direction to go or what to choose. This quality of these two musicians must have led them to be mediators of the festival. I understand why the festival was concluded with their duo set.
Perhaps we can draw a borderline here. Some people may criticize some of the paths that Rowe and Nakamura chose as a retreat to the old-style improvisation, which might also mean a defeat of the Onkyo movement against the established nature of free improvisation. However, I do not think that it is creative to be reductionist simply for the sake of reductionism, and ignoring the various circumstances of each occasion. That would be just dogmatism. In the end, the only thing a musician can do is to be true to their own quality that they are destined to deal with for their entire life.
Among the musicians who worked in the reductionist style at AMPLIFY, the ones whose sounds stemmed from their own flesh and blood with no electronics use were Katsura Yamauchi and Ami Yoshida. Apart from the content (see footnote #1 for explanation of this term) of the music, they seemed to try to reach somewhere beyond the modernism of improvisation, and yet this also resulted in appealing to the layers of history of human memories. This happened because they presented voice and instrument on stage in a traditional way.
While there are sounds that are generated from electronics devices with no direct connection to human memories, there are other sounds which dig into the core of the human body and reach the depths of history just like finding a new layer of ore. In the junction of the tabula rasa state of neo-futuristic electronics music and the ancient memories of human beings, we experience a confused sense of time when we hear the sounds. Possibly our modernist method of dealing with time collapses when forced to deal with this kind of approach. In any case, whether the performer's body is actively involved with the performance or not (the fact that it is related to the oral airway like vocal cords or breathing is very important here) is a point, and we can draw another borderline here.
Here, Sachiko M showed up to destabilize the borderline. We may call the performances of Keith Rowe, Taku Unami, Toshimaru Nakamura and Mitsuhiro Yoshimura with an old term live electronics. But Sachiko M's contact mike performance, in which she seemed to play closely with her sense of touch and not just actively involving her fingers with the performance, was different. Just like she picked up sine wave from a sampler, her contact mike performance is based on her intentional misuse of dealing with it like a scrap, not using it as acoustic equipment. She played this recording device, which is supposed to keep silent for the sounds to be recorded, like an amplification device. The contact mike is played to make sounds based on reality, totally free from any memory, while being closely related to her physical being - especially to her sense of touch that can be called cognition of fingers.
Our sense of touch is closely related to our own memories. But it has nothing to do with music in general and is related to different sensations from sounds, such as a pleasurable feeling to touch a lover's skin or a finger to touch a fruit in the kitchen to check how ripe it is. Using contact mikes, Sachiko M established her performance to interact with listeners through a coupling of sense of touch and memories, not by means of a coupling of acoustic sense and memories. She focused the spotlight on the entanglement of subject and object that arises at the birth of sounds, by entwining her fingers on and off the contact mikes, not only with focusing the texture of objective sounds, but also with the cognition of fingers.
On the other hand, the physical senses that sustained Katsura Yamauchi and Ami Yoshida's performances involved the layers of history of human memories, which could sound romantic to some listeners. But the physical sense of Sachiko M is always sliding within a highly aware realm, sticking to complete realism. Her self-definition of "I am not a musician" should be regarded as a key phrase in this context, deeply related to this specific performance.
Just like Derek Bailey used to do, the festival's key musician Keith Rowe seems to fold the layers of several generations of improvised music history into his performances with his background as a long-term musician. He may appear to be a tightrope walker on the surface, but what he played was a live electronics improvisation that could be regarded as a translation act of putting his memories into electronics sounds. It was impressive that he was willing to move towards his co-performers such as Taku Unami, Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura to open a space for dialogues, setting aside his own firm aesthetics that he has built with AMM over many years. It was not like he was donating his time and energy for co-performers from younger generations as a master of free improvisation, but instead, he was genuinely trying to communicate with them with an open mind by paying careful attentions to the environments, always starting fresh with a clean slate in each set. I can tell that this open heart of welcome style of approach made it possible to organize radical improvisation orchestras like MIMEO.
In his solo set, Rowe added some samples of old classical music to realistic electronic sounds that were close to the original style of noise music, occasionally using a portable fan which evoked a propeller noise. The old-world feeling of the sampling and noises that Rowe brought in the performance seemed to be overlapped with his own old memories. In fact, he mentioned that a propeller noise evokes the noise of air raids to him, as he spent his childhood in the midst of wartime. As seen in this fact, Rowe's improvisation is defined with his multilayered experiences and consciousness beyond simply the typical boundaries of 20th century experimental music. This is why his music is performed with infinite disparity every time he plays, even without co-performers and even in this time of the “avant-garde” concept losing its value.
If Ami Yoshida and Katsura Yamauchi are trying to pull something from the old layers of history of human memories that are beyond their own individual consciousness by lowering down their resonant sonde deep into the core of the body - or the central information center of the body. (Of course, it does not mean that they can always reach the old layers of history by exploring their subconscious area every time they play.) On the other hand, Rowe's way of presenting the memories is quite bibliographical. Here is another explanation: Rowe's work table where his guitar rests is just like his study room where his books for reference are piled up high, and his improvisation is performed just like writing a text on brand new paper. However, his performance is not directly descriptive, like expressing his wartime experience with actual sounds of strafing. Instead, he uses indirect sounds such as a propeller noise as an implication, like writing a poem. Perhaps Rowe began the process of performing music on his worktable during the time of AMM. If so, perhaps Rowe is putting elements of his performance on his table one by one, whatever it is Onkyo or reductionism, just like reading a new book. He may not understand some parts instantly, but after reading it repeatedly, he may get it just like filling additional writings between lines.
Needless to say, none of his co-performers, who were walking in a straight, focused line using reductionism-style improvisation, spent their time cultivating their own workspace to collect miscellaneous elements during their sets. Compared with Rowe who was playing like a writer, every co-performer seemed to play much more simply without walking too far from themselves in a text-independent environment. Of course, this was why listeners were able to concentrate on their sounds and be free from the excessive information overflowing in this post-modern time, and could experience the total picture of being, via this self-limited improvisation performance style.
Accordingly, the limited/alternative style of improvisation represented by reductionism seems to be the approach that remains most in actual practice, in spite of various recent attempts to deconstruct the established conventional improvisation performances. For those simple styles of performances, it does not matter if the music is considered a paradigm shift in the history of improvised music or not from a macro viewpoint. Improvisers from the older generations have built their own specific identities by polishing their skills playing free music, to eventually stand on stage as experts of instrumental performance. However, to reach the state of reductionism, they have to abandon their established identities. There were musicians like Derek Bailey who had tried to expose the origin of performance by returning to simple styles of music without abandoning their own expertise.
A reductionism musician tries to make the audience observe the moment when his new identity is constructed each time, instead of reconstructing his identity that was already established at some point in the past. It should remind the audience of the pure methodology of improvisation with which the musician convinces the listeners that the performance is born in this moment, without originating in the past. Perhaps only someone like Keith Rowe – who not only has an open mind of hospitality, but also who can reset himself every time he plays while having a history of being a constructive improviser - is able to show empathy for this new style of Onkyo reductionists. In Rowe's flexible behavior during AMPLIFY 2008, I saw a rare nature that is difficult to find in the U.S. and European improvisation scenes where pushing one’s own identity to the forefront is usually believed to be a virtue. Perhaps Rowe is trying to practice nomadism in the free improv scene, which the late German musician Peter Kowald had been pursuing, too. I understand well why Jon Abbey of Erstwhile values Rowe highly.
Like John Zorn did in the past, Jon Abbey considers the Japanese improv scene to be crucial, and held his label festival in Tokyo for the second time. He considered Keith Rowe as the main performer, included the remarkable mediator Toshimaru Nakamura as an advisor, included avant-garde idols Sachiko M and Ami Yoshida (not every listener may be able to enjoy their performances, but their presence is important to remind of the fact that experimental/improvised music does not belong to only men) to document their current activities, and included Taku Unami, Katsura Yamauchi and Mitsuhiro Yoshimura as new voices in the scene.
The festival covered a broad range of performances. Katsura Yamauchi presented his European approach using limited/alternative improvisation style by using breathy tones often. Mitsuhiro Yoshimura kept letting out continuous sound like sine wave on and on by using feedback noise of headphone/microphone in a darkened room - it was impossible for the audience to see how he played. Keith Rowe and Taku Unami's duo presented unique installation-style electronics music using a contrast of the speakers' location, with an indistinct combination of their sounds making it hard to distinguish who played which. Ami Yoshida inclined the audience's mind to her howling voice, which created a charged atmosphere in every moment. Sachiko M adhered to her own acoustic realism with an unparalleled contact mike solo performance. Keith Rowe and Sachiko M's duo sounded like solo plus solo rather than a duo performance. There was a duo of Yamauchi and Yoshimura. Then at the end, Rowe and Nakamura presented aggressive duo music like a rock in which Rowe returned to his drone performance.
The curators said that one of the most important purposes of having this festival in Tokyo was to realize the duo of Keith Rowe and Sachiko M. Rowe admires Sachiko M's performance, in which she looks into her self and simply digs deep into the core of her being, as one of the most influential musicians for him. It sounds like the most accurate understanding of Sachiko M's music. In the field of the Onkyo music or limited/alternative improvisation, it seemed that only general theories dominated without considering discrete theories enough for each case so far. That was why Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura have often been mentioned synonymously with Onkyo music. What we need to try is to reconstruct the diversity of music with a fresh approach each time by setting the origin of sound in the 'here and now’ (especially for improvised music) in the field of music criticism, too.
*1: I call it "content" here for convenience, but it might be almost impossible to interpret Ami Yoshida's voice which sounds like a murmur of an unborn baby who is about to become a human being, or Katsura Yamauchi's breath which changes a horn into somewhere like a cave exposed to the wind. These sounds can barely be explained by anomalies of conventional saxophone or voice performances. These sounds seemed to be born without being related to any conventional way. How to describe these sounds is a big issue for us.
(translation by Yuko Zama)
