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Making a hash of things
Dec. 1st, 2004 01:02 pm'This is my workshop and I'm working here... These are my source, inspiration source for the pictures. Nature things.'
'I'm familiar with this kind of feeling, always unsuccessful,' says Tori Kudo of Maher Shalal Hash Baz in programme 1 of series 2 of Swedish MTV's This Is Our Music. 'So sad! I'm always sad with this work. I'm using clay, this is my clay, it's my garden clay, it's white, very white, I like it. So I prepare clay and glaze by myself, not buying. This is for wine cooler.'
Up until now I've only been vaguely aware of Maher Shalal Hash Baz. I knew they were signed to Stephen Pastel's Geographic label, and when I met Bill Wells in Tokyo this summer I heard a lot about Tori, who often collaborates with Bill. But I found the clips of Tori as both a musician and a potter very compelling and will certainly be listening to him in future. His attitudes to failure, to error and to nature seem very Japanese, and contain a wisdom I'm very interested in. He exemplifies the Shinto attitudes I was trying to capture in what's perhaps the strongest track on my forthcoming album, 'Life of the Fields'.
'I'm not a good potter at all,' says Tori. 'But anyway I dig the ground and take clays and I make glaze using chaff, rice chaff, it contains silica, silica makes this colour, white. Yes.' 'Do you see a connection between doing this and the kind of music you do?' asks the interviewer. 'Yes, both areas always facing mistake and error! And I get used to be in the situation, so I get used to be unsuccessful. Ha ha ha!'
'Mistakes and errors' have been one of my main musical interests for the last four or five years. The sheen of perfect music, music with 'impact', music that 'gets it right', not only bores me to tears, it seems to me to be 'Platonic'. For perfect music seems to seek to rid itself of the contingencies of its physical production, and of the bodies of its players, in an attempt to get close to 'the music of the spheres', or Plato's realm of ideas. Those who strive for perfection (and every western studio engineer will stop the tape at the merest hint of a rogue click) seem to seek, as Wire put it, 'The Ideal Copy'. Cage railed against the tendency of trained musicians to cerebrate endlessly about the relationships between notes, but to seem incapable of hearing, really hearing, a single note. Since Cage, and since the 'orientalisation' of serious music (both classical and pop), these dogmas have shifted. Ensembles like the Scratch Orchestra and the Portsmouth Sinfonia, and electronic pop music influenced by Japanoise and Glitch, combine two strong traits of the anti-Platonic western tradition -- democratisation (anyone can do it) and an increasingly 'oriental' or Japanese attitude to 'failure'. For these movements see accidents and imperfections as something to be celebrated, as they are in the Japanese art of pottery known as yakimono.
My favourite show this year was an event in Omihatchiman where tea ceremony was combined with 'aesthetics of failure' electronica. At this show there was a beautifully Japanese collision of old and new, united by respect for nature. As the tea house lady asked us to admire the texture of cracks in the bottom of our tea cups, music was being generated by a perspex box of crickets, whose movements, detected by motion sensors, triggered electronic sounds which mingled with their singing. Failure and nature, these two recurrent Japanese themes, emerge strongly as positive values in Tori Kudo's interview.
There's a gorgeous clip of Tori sitting by a shinto way-marker in his home town of Matsuyama, singing a song about an 'open field with a window, open field with no child'. His guitar playing is deliberately, fascinatingly broken, and, like Derek Bailey's, it brings us close to the moment, makes us pay attention to the cracks, the textures, the contingencies, the particularities, the oddities of the sound being produced.
When I look at someone like Tori Kudo, I see someone far ahead along the path I'm on myself. I feel as if I've been lost in western 'Platonist music', music that attempts various kinds of perfection which turn out to be only pastiches of various kinds of escape from the here and now. My demos have always been better than my finished songs, and the more I work on music the more respect I have for unprocessed sound, random sound, 'broken' sound, the sound of here and now, the sound of nature. Anders Edstrom's film about Derek Bailey, 'ONE PLUS ONE 2', which I saw at the Purple Institute in Paris this July, was a fabulous document of this sensibility and perhaps my favourite film of the year. I briefly lapsed into a kind of poetry after seeing it:
The extraordinary inserted into time sideways;
Massive attention to rubbish renders it important.
Swaying twigs, Derek's wife; shabby London windows.
The old man's trainers, the old man's computer, the old man's
Improvisation. The metaphysics of ugliness. In the audience
Familiar Paris Japanese faces; Hiroshi, Masako, Mayumi...
Everybody slightly older, slightly more themselves.
Perhaps learning to appreciate texture and patina and the passing of time is part of learning to appreciate the process of ageing itself? Perhaps loving life only starts when leaving life (slowly, slowly) begins.
I leave you with an imperfect yet perfect field recording of a Japanese girl called Hikaru, recorded last year in San Francisco. Hikaru made this 'poem' for an art school project involving many small, simple talking dolls, but you could think of it as perhaps the most fundamental creed of the Shinto religion, or one of the core feelings of the Japanese people, or a central tenet of 'the aesthetics of failure'... Personally, I hear here the same voice I hear in Tori Kudo's work. I link it not just to John Cage, Derek Bailey, Kim Cascone, Stephan Mathieu and hundreds of other wise musicians, but to Ryuichi Sakamoto's claim that a 'slow life' Japan might be a 'beautiful third rate place' where economic slowdown allows nature to return. Japan's deep understanding of the positive side of contingency and failure is perhaps the most compelling reason why the 'Japanization' of the world might save it.
'I'm familiar with this kind of feeling, always unsuccessful,' says Tori Kudo of Maher Shalal Hash Baz in programme 1 of series 2 of Swedish MTV's This Is Our Music. 'So sad! I'm always sad with this work. I'm using clay, this is my clay, it's my garden clay, it's white, very white, I like it. So I prepare clay and glaze by myself, not buying. This is for wine cooler.'
Up until now I've only been vaguely aware of Maher Shalal Hash Baz. I knew they were signed to Stephen Pastel's Geographic label, and when I met Bill Wells in Tokyo this summer I heard a lot about Tori, who often collaborates with Bill. But I found the clips of Tori as both a musician and a potter very compelling and will certainly be listening to him in future. His attitudes to failure, to error and to nature seem very Japanese, and contain a wisdom I'm very interested in. He exemplifies the Shinto attitudes I was trying to capture in what's perhaps the strongest track on my forthcoming album, 'Life of the Fields'.
'I'm not a good potter at all,' says Tori. 'But anyway I dig the ground and take clays and I make glaze using chaff, rice chaff, it contains silica, silica makes this colour, white. Yes.' 'Do you see a connection between doing this and the kind of music you do?' asks the interviewer. 'Yes, both areas always facing mistake and error! And I get used to be in the situation, so I get used to be unsuccessful. Ha ha ha!'
'Mistakes and errors' have been one of my main musical interests for the last four or five years. The sheen of perfect music, music with 'impact', music that 'gets it right', not only bores me to tears, it seems to me to be 'Platonic'. For perfect music seems to seek to rid itself of the contingencies of its physical production, and of the bodies of its players, in an attempt to get close to 'the music of the spheres', or Plato's realm of ideas. Those who strive for perfection (and every western studio engineer will stop the tape at the merest hint of a rogue click) seem to seek, as Wire put it, 'The Ideal Copy'. Cage railed against the tendency of trained musicians to cerebrate endlessly about the relationships between notes, but to seem incapable of hearing, really hearing, a single note. Since Cage, and since the 'orientalisation' of serious music (both classical and pop), these dogmas have shifted. Ensembles like the Scratch Orchestra and the Portsmouth Sinfonia, and electronic pop music influenced by Japanoise and Glitch, combine two strong traits of the anti-Platonic western tradition -- democratisation (anyone can do it) and an increasingly 'oriental' or Japanese attitude to 'failure'. For these movements see accidents and imperfections as something to be celebrated, as they are in the Japanese art of pottery known as yakimono.
My favourite show this year was an event in Omihatchiman where tea ceremony was combined with 'aesthetics of failure' electronica. At this show there was a beautifully Japanese collision of old and new, united by respect for nature. As the tea house lady asked us to admire the texture of cracks in the bottom of our tea cups, music was being generated by a perspex box of crickets, whose movements, detected by motion sensors, triggered electronic sounds which mingled with their singing. Failure and nature, these two recurrent Japanese themes, emerge strongly as positive values in Tori Kudo's interview.
There's a gorgeous clip of Tori sitting by a shinto way-marker in his home town of Matsuyama, singing a song about an 'open field with a window, open field with no child'. His guitar playing is deliberately, fascinatingly broken, and, like Derek Bailey's, it brings us close to the moment, makes us pay attention to the cracks, the textures, the contingencies, the particularities, the oddities of the sound being produced.
When I look at someone like Tori Kudo, I see someone far ahead along the path I'm on myself. I feel as if I've been lost in western 'Platonist music', music that attempts various kinds of perfection which turn out to be only pastiches of various kinds of escape from the here and now. My demos have always been better than my finished songs, and the more I work on music the more respect I have for unprocessed sound, random sound, 'broken' sound, the sound of here and now, the sound of nature. Anders Edstrom's film about Derek Bailey, 'ONE PLUS ONE 2', which I saw at the Purple Institute in Paris this July, was a fabulous document of this sensibility and perhaps my favourite film of the year. I briefly lapsed into a kind of poetry after seeing it:
The extraordinary inserted into time sideways;
Massive attention to rubbish renders it important.
Swaying twigs, Derek's wife; shabby London windows.
The old man's trainers, the old man's computer, the old man's
Improvisation. The metaphysics of ugliness. In the audience
Familiar Paris Japanese faces; Hiroshi, Masako, Mayumi...
Everybody slightly older, slightly more themselves.
Perhaps learning to appreciate texture and patina and the passing of time is part of learning to appreciate the process of ageing itself? Perhaps loving life only starts when leaving life (slowly, slowly) begins.
I leave you with an imperfect yet perfect field recording of a Japanese girl called Hikaru, recorded last year in San Francisco. Hikaru made this 'poem' for an art school project involving many small, simple talking dolls, but you could think of it as perhaps the most fundamental creed of the Shinto religion, or one of the core feelings of the Japanese people, or a central tenet of 'the aesthetics of failure'... Personally, I hear here the same voice I hear in Tori Kudo's work. I link it not just to John Cage, Derek Bailey, Kim Cascone, Stephan Mathieu and hundreds of other wise musicians, but to Ryuichi Sakamoto's claim that a 'slow life' Japan might be a 'beautiful third rate place' where economic slowdown allows nature to return. Japan's deep understanding of the positive side of contingency and failure is perhaps the most compelling reason why the 'Japanization' of the world might save it.