concrete

Installation
The Voice of Inconstant Savage
Commissioned for the Engawa – Japanese Contemporary Art Season programme organized by Calouste Gulbenkian Museum's Modern Art Center, The Voice of Inconstant Savage is an immersive installation that superimposes a prayer inspired by the story of a 16th-century Portuguese missionary, a chant from a Kakure-Kirishitan (hidden Christians) prayer – a religion rooted in Nagasaki Prefecture –, a chant from the Karawara spirits of the Awá indigenous people – who live in the Amazon rainforest – and a chorus of Western Gregorian chant. Morinaga questions the position of the aesthetics of inconstancy in relation to the discourse of the “savage” that modern society confronts.

Field recordings
Sombat Simla: Master Of Bamboo Mouth Organ
Simla is known in Thailand as one of the greatest living players of the khene, the ancient bamboo mouth organ particularly associated with Laos but found throughout East and Southeast Asia. His virtuosic and endlessly inventive renditions of traditional and popular songs have earned him the title ‘the god of khene’, and he is known for his innovative techniques and ability to mimic other instruments and non-musical sound, including, as a writer for the Bangkok Post describes, ‘the sound of a train journey, complete with traffic crossings and the call of barbecue chicken vendors’.

Cinema
Five to Nine
5 to 9 comprises four short films that transpire across 5pm to 9am on the evening of the historic Brazil-Germany match at World Cup 2014, spanning intimate vignettes of unrequited love and final meetings. In China, a young migrant worker has saved 3,000 RMB to finally spend a night with a middle-aged prostitute, but she plans to leave the city the same night instead. In Singapore, a local teacher and his paramour from China are out for a rendezvous, submitting the fate of their future to the result of the football match. The Japanese counterpart centres on a porno-projectionist collecting debts from the punks for the poor. The film concludes in Thailand with the filming of the last scene of a sci-fi movie. Behind the camera, the director is suspicious of his leading actor and the actress who is also his wife.

Publication
Yasuhiro Morinaga + Roberto Paci Dalo 『Japanese Girls at the Harbor』
『Japanese Girls at the Harbor』
CONCRETE presents new CD release, “Japanese Girls at the Harbor.” This is the sonorization for Japanese silent film classic, “Minato no Nihon Musume”by Hiroshi Shimizu, 1933. This CD is the collaborative project between Japanese sound designer, Yasuhiro Morinaga and Italian multimedia artist, Roberto Paci Dalo. The movie Japanese Girls at the Harbor(Minato no Nihon musume) – directed by Hiroshi Shimizu in 1933 – is one of the most modern and intercultural Japanese silent films ever produced. Morinaga and Paci Dalo’s new soundtrack for the film creates alternative narrative structures through a complex layering of noise, voices, drones, environmental, instrumental, and electronic sounds.