Very much my cup of tea
Aug. 11th, 2004 12:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusToday's Omihachiman tea party, organised by PHIRIP, was simply fabulous, the most exciting, atmospheric and imaginative music event I've been to all year.
(Click for a grid of photos of the Sukiya tea event)
For a start, the town of Omihachiman is utterly gorgeous. An hour outside Kyoto, it lies between Lake Biwa and a series of little Chinese mountains with cable cars running up them. The streets are full of wooden buildings, which this month house art installations of all kinds; it's the Omihachiman Biennale. Other towns might use repurposed post-industrial buildings for their art -- 'dead tech', it's called. But industry in Omihatchiman is very much alive. So you get an art show in a sake factory, with the smell of the fermenting rice all around and sake makers milling about with strainers and sieves, or in a charmingly run-down cinema, or in a school where lithe schoolgirls are stalking the corridors or filing into the orchestra room for practice.
Video clip panning from tea ceremony to concert (.avi, 7.8 MB)
Just as work and art co-exist happily in the town, so do tradition and technology at Phirip's tea party. In the elegant and ancient wooden building tea ceremony is performed continuously, while the electronic musicians (Yuko Nexus6, Hirano Sabura, Tetsuro Nishi, Phirip and Kawamura Yosuke) play. The audience chews gelatinous, powdered warabimochi rice cakes and listens with attention and pleasure. There should be some sort of contradiction between the rituals of the far past and all these electronics, but in fact everything fits perfectly. Japanese tea ceremony is about paying attention to little details, relishing the taste of the powdery matcha, examining the cracks in the cup, enjoying form. And this kind of laptop listening music is also about attention to tiny details, the patina of sound. It invites you to relish error just as the tea mistress asks you to admire the imperfections in the pottery. It asks you to enjoy the appreciation of form. Laptop music might have been born to be heard in a sukiya, the wooden tea house built for pleasure in an artificial garden.
Video clip of Yuko Nexus6 feeding medieval street hawker cries through Max/MSP (.avi, 10.03 MB)
It was a thrill for me to see Yuko Nexus6 in person. Anne Laplantine and I were listening to three records last year when we made 'Summerisle': Nobukazu Takemura's 'Songbook', 'Mani' by Dorine_Muraille, and 'Journal de Tokyo' by Yuko Nexus6. Yuko's performance is very much my cup of tea. I'm fascinated by Japan's medieval street cries, and Yuko uses them as her main material today, running her renditons of warabimochi sellers' cries back and forth through the 'sewing machine' of her G4 laptop, recording them to cassette then despooling the tape and running it across the head of a handheld player as she stalks around the teahouse in her slightly-too-short orange dress.
Video clip of Yuko Nexus6 manipulating tape (.avi, 8.9 MB)
There are other harmonies between tradition and technology; carp, crickets and turtles move about a tiny perspex Japanese garden, triggering samples and colours as they go, or having their tiny sounds amplified. Someone mikes the tea ceremony and filters its sounds. Someone else plays photo-optic theremins until they resemble semis chirruping. It's all very ancient and very modern at the same time. Even when Phirip does her tea party piece, a children's counting song that suddenly goes batty and screechy, it feels as Japanese as calligraphy. Admire the mixture of control and chaos, the big splashy gestures!
Video clip of Phirip's performance (.avi, 12.26 MB)
(Click for a grid of photos of the Sukiya tea event)
For a start, the town of Omihachiman is utterly gorgeous. An hour outside Kyoto, it lies between Lake Biwa and a series of little Chinese mountains with cable cars running up them. The streets are full of wooden buildings, which this month house art installations of all kinds; it's the Omihachiman Biennale. Other towns might use repurposed post-industrial buildings for their art -- 'dead tech', it's called. But industry in Omihatchiman is very much alive. So you get an art show in a sake factory, with the smell of the fermenting rice all around and sake makers milling about with strainers and sieves, or in a charmingly run-down cinema, or in a school where lithe schoolgirls are stalking the corridors or filing into the orchestra room for practice.
Video clip panning from tea ceremony to concert (.avi, 7.8 MB)
Just as work and art co-exist happily in the town, so do tradition and technology at Phirip's tea party. In the elegant and ancient wooden building tea ceremony is performed continuously, while the electronic musicians (Yuko Nexus6, Hirano Sabura, Tetsuro Nishi, Phirip and Kawamura Yosuke) play. The audience chews gelatinous, powdered warabimochi rice cakes and listens with attention and pleasure. There should be some sort of contradiction between the rituals of the far past and all these electronics, but in fact everything fits perfectly. Japanese tea ceremony is about paying attention to little details, relishing the taste of the powdery matcha, examining the cracks in the cup, enjoying form. And this kind of laptop listening music is also about attention to tiny details, the patina of sound. It invites you to relish error just as the tea mistress asks you to admire the imperfections in the pottery. It asks you to enjoy the appreciation of form. Laptop music might have been born to be heard in a sukiya, the wooden tea house built for pleasure in an artificial garden.
Video clip of Yuko Nexus6 feeding medieval street hawker cries through Max/MSP (.avi, 10.03 MB)
It was a thrill for me to see Yuko Nexus6 in person. Anne Laplantine and I were listening to three records last year when we made 'Summerisle': Nobukazu Takemura's 'Songbook', 'Mani' by Dorine_Muraille, and 'Journal de Tokyo' by Yuko Nexus6. Yuko's performance is very much my cup of tea. I'm fascinated by Japan's medieval street cries, and Yuko uses them as her main material today, running her renditons of warabimochi sellers' cries back and forth through the 'sewing machine' of her G4 laptop, recording them to cassette then despooling the tape and running it across the head of a handheld player as she stalks around the teahouse in her slightly-too-short orange dress.
Video clip of Yuko Nexus6 manipulating tape (.avi, 8.9 MB)
There are other harmonies between tradition and technology; carp, crickets and turtles move about a tiny perspex Japanese garden, triggering samples and colours as they go, or having their tiny sounds amplified. Someone mikes the tea ceremony and filters its sounds. Someone else plays photo-optic theremins until they resemble semis chirruping. It's all very ancient and very modern at the same time. Even when Phirip does her tea party piece, a children's counting song that suddenly goes batty and screechy, it feels as Japanese as calligraphy. Admire the mixture of control and chaos, the big splashy gestures!
Video clip of Phirip's performance (.avi, 12.26 MB)
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Yuko Nexus6
Date: 2004-08-10 01:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-10 01:30 pm (UTC)Edward
ps. it especially helps if the things announcing are in english as she can not read japanese.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-10 02:20 pm (UTC)Yes--this is the future. Aesthetes, ho!
W
amn!
Date: 2004-08-10 03:40 pm (UTC)Aw if i had not been so childlishly ambitious ("in two years i'll be rich and move to japan" was my line) i might have saved enough to go there this summer and i can imagine i would have gone to the same event and say "hi nick, what a coincidence!"
Spiders in Kreuzberg are already tarantula sized, specially around bus stops with illuminated advertisements near the Spree, it's 35ยบ, i went to a barbeque inside a bedroom
have some good time
Re: amn!
Date: 2004-08-10 04:11 pm (UTC)cheers!
Date: 2004-08-10 04:52 pm (UTC)-roddy
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-10 04:53 pm (UTC)Btw, you might want to look into video compression, which is great for saving disk space and bandwidth. I downloaded the 4 video clips and compressed them with the DivX 5.11 codec (http://www.divx.com/divx/download/) and the clips came out to nearly a third of a size with no loss of quality. It compressed nearly 40 MB into a nice 14! Only problem is of course u have to have the DivX codec installed to watch them..
(forgive me for such a geeky post!)
hugs
Adam
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-10 10:52 pm (UTC)Looks like lots of fun!
Thanks for sharing, but does it interfere with your enjoyment to
be recording this?
Codecs
Date: 2004-08-10 10:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-10 11:07 pm (UTC)There are two great Japanese traditions:
1. Doing photographable things, and
2. Photographing them.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-08-12 03:05 pm (UTC)Thunderfish
Date: 2009-08-21 04:31 am (UTC)I didn't know where to post this but, a film in this series was shot in Omi-Hachiman, much to our surprise. We are hosting a director in this series and by coincidence found that Thunderfish(English title) was shot there.
Re: Thunderfish
Date: 2009-08-21 04:35 am (UTC)