Current

The Voice of Inconstant Savage
[Commissioned Work] This multifaceted, polyphonic and immersive sound installation by Yasuhiro Morinaga establishes a historical encounter between Portuguese culture and Japan, memories and myths that remain and coexist with other cultures of the Amazon. Commissioned for the Engawa – Japanese Contemporary Art Season programme , The Voice of Inconstant (2023) 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’.

Performing arts

TEOAS
On 22 June 2017, the 16-year-old Junaid Khan was stabbed to death on a Mathura-bound train by a mob that allegedly mocked his skullcap and called him a beef-eater. Responding to the growing number of cases of mob lynching triggered by hate-driven communal politics in India, this work studies the actions that constitute prayer. In examining four movements — bowing, kneeling, lowering the forehead to the floor, and bringing one's palms together — 'the extremities of a surface are lines' poses questions of deference and resistance. How does the body perform its beliefs? What is the physicality of deference? What notions of space and time are embedded in the act of praying? Can deference, when performed outside its usual contexts, and repeated ceaselessly, transform into an act of resistance? How do shape, topography, orientation and horizontality inform our understanding as performers of belief? The soundscape features Junaid’s mother Saira’s testimony about her son’s death, looped and transformed into a haunting call against hate and oppression. In doing so, it references the politics of Steve Reich's 'Come Out' (1966), which loops four seconds of testimony from a wrongfully detained man in Harlem, as a potent reminder of the injustices the civil rights movement sought to address. This work stemmed out of engagements with the #NotInMyName campaign. It was briefly titled Bodies of Dissent and then presented as a work-in-progress with the title 'Pray' as part of 'Long Nights of Resistance'. The work was subsequently called 'Geometries of Faith', and then 'Geometries of Belief'. It is now titled 'the extremities of a surface are lines', in resonance with the Euclidean sense of geometry its choreographic treatment has invoked. The changing titles have had much to do with the subject of faith and belief. They cannot be defined with absolute conviction and can only ever be performed as an embodied proposition, subject to the conditions of a given time and space.

Archival sounds

『Archival Sound Series : Jose Maceda』
武満徹(日本)やタンドゥン(中国)と並び、20世紀のアジアを代表する作曲家であるフィリピンのホセ・マセダ(1917-2004)による半世紀前のフィールド・レコーディング集。 現代音楽の作曲家であるホセは、東南アジアの音楽文化を体系化した一人として民族音楽学の研究者としても多大な業績を残した人物である。本作品はマセダが初めてフィールドワークを行った1953年からの約20年間を振り返り、フィリピンの少数民族による音楽文化を包括する音源集となっている。地理学的な国境線だけでは語ることのできないフィリピンの音楽文化を、ホセの触る録音機からきこえてくる音・音楽・ノイズを我々の耳へ近づけてくれる作品となっている。