Today'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)
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