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’.

Outland ethnologies
Thang Mo by Ngoc Dai [Vietnam]
Ngọc Đại is one of the most influential composers in contemporary music in Vietnam. Due to the socio-political and sexual lyrics, the original album was prohibited by government to release in Vietnam. This album presents the Dai's unique singing style, evoking the northern Vietnamese folksong, composition based on the chanson music. Ngọc Đại was born in 1946 in Vietnam. He studied composition in Hanoi Conservatory from 1977 to 1983 but soon decided to leave the national communist system and live as a true independent artist and is probably the only socially and politically committed composer in Vietnam and he has also been recently convicted by the Vietnamese Authorities for being a counter-revolutionary artist when his last album was released.

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.

Archival sounds
『Archival Sound Series : Jose Maceda』
  Jose Maceda [1917-2004] was an ethnomusicologist and composer from Philippines. Maceda dedicated to the understanding of traditional music of Philippines. Since 1953, He has conduced field research throughout the Philippines and in eastern and western Africa, Brazil, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam and has written extensively about this research for the publications. As a composer, Maceda contributed his interest on music concrete since around 1954 and he has conduced his career as a composer. This CD is a collection of different Filipino traditional music and folk songs, recorded by Jose Maceda from 1953 to 1972. The CD dedicates to the ranges of different location, music, song in Philippines and introduces Maceda’s contribution to the field recording techniques and interests.