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’.

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.  

Cinema
Uzu
The Autumn Festival of Dogo, one of the most violent religious festivals in Japan, takes place each year in the town of Matsuyama on the island of Shikoku. From the meticulous preparation to the battle, it is above all an immersive plunge into a mysterious and abstruse ceremony reported by Gaspard Kuentz (to whom we owe notably Kings of the Wind & Electric Queens, co-direct- ed with Cédric Dupire, VdR 2014). Alternating between external and distant viewpoints – such as the women leaning on the balcony to watch – and the perspective of an on-board and subjective camera, intertwining silence into the tumult of the collective trance, Uzu builds the immersive account of an event and conserves the tension required to evoke the brutal assault. Somewhere between visual ethnography and war reporting, a sensorial choreography imbued with violence, in submission to the chief.