Wednesday 28 March 2018, 7.30pm
Pleased to host the Japanese duo of Minami Saeki (voice) and Taku Sugimoto (guitar) following the release of their debut collaborative recording – Songs – last year.
Recorded outdoors, Songs has an unhurried openess, with the deceptively stark unwinding of sparse voice and instrumentation leaving the listener feeling almost as if they've stumbled upon something secret, unintended to be shared. But there is nothing possessive about the soundworld that Saeki and Sugimoto conjure up, which loses none of it's expansiveness through being moved indoors.
Opening the evening is the UK premiere of Sandro Mussida's powerful work, Ventuno Costellazioni Invisibili. Performed by an eight-strong ensemble, the piece layers flute, piano, guitar electronics and percussion to conjure an undulating, minimalist vista that glints and shimmers like a dawn-lit landscape through the mist.
“...there’s something totally captivating about this LP that can’t be explained in terms of its technique or theory. It’s a record whose crafty metaphysics encourage a sublime, unknown state which must be experienced to be understood.” – Boomkat
film actress, singer, and dancer
born in Nagasaki on the 18 February 1990
she studied classical ballet, contemporary dance, classical singing, etc.
she has acted in films, e.g., “Village on the Village” (Yukihiro Kurokawa) or “Natsu no Musumetachi-Himegoto” (Teiichi Hori) among others.
she is active as a singer and has performed with Taku Sugimoto, Junichiro Tanaka, Wakana Ikeda, Masafumi Ezaki, Takashi Masubuchi, Manfred Werder, Stefan Thut among others in the fields of both pop and experimental music.
the CD “Songs” is a collaborative work with Taku Sugimoto.
composer / guitarist / improviser
Currently he is more active in composing, while maintaining an interest in improvisation.
These past few years he has performed, worked, and collaborated closely with Radu Malfatti, Manfred Werder, Stefan Thut, Cristian Alvear, Christian Kobi, Simon Roy Christensen, Johnny Chang, Takeshi Masubuchi, and Minami Saeki.
He is a member of Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble, an ensemble focusing on performing compositions of contemporary or experimental music.
http://www.japanimprov.com/tsugimoto/index.html
http://soundamerican.org/idobata-kaigi-01.html
Jan Hendrickse / flute
Preetha Narayanan / violin
Alessandra Novaga / el.guitar
Simon Allen / percussions (triangles, glockenspiel, gongs)
Martin Pyne / percussions (triangles, glockenspiel, tam-tam)
Tal Hendrickse / live electronic
Sandro Mussida / live electronics & direction
Eliza McCarthy / piano
"Ventuno Costellazioni Invisibili, a composition for violin, flute, clarinet, electric guitar, piano, percussion, and computers, was realized by an ensemble made up of Enrico Gabrielli, Yoko Morimyo, Susanne Satz, Alessandra Novaga, Giulio Patara, Sebastiano De Gennaro, Giovanni Isgrò and Mussida, during the Spring of 2015. Presented in two distinct realizations on each side of the LP, it is a work defined meditative depth and space, built from a focus on transfiguration of perceptual time – pitches played at different speeds, musical cells generated by the rotation of triangular figures distributed in time and space. The result is a sonic world of startling intricacy and beauty – one marked by the same openness, experimentation, and elegant restraint, which has long been the hallmark of the Italian sonic avant-garde. It is a near perfect image of minimalist Classical music blowing off the dust, shedding the past, diving toward countless optimistic possibilities of what it may become. It’s rippling sonorities, the inheritors of the ground once sketched by Franco Battiato and Giusto Pio, taking a radical step into the unknown.“ - Soundohm
