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NUMBERS MATTER 121

Programme:

Episode 2 2-1  Hiromi Miyakita: Nutu/Omelette (14′ 03″) from Kyotango 2-2  Chiharu MK + Micelle: Re:vive (10′ 20″) from Sapporo 2-3  Akio Suzuki: Bakkutsu (莫窟) (13′ 05″) from Kyotango

Interval

Episode 3 3-1 Wei Wei aka VAVABOND: 懐中電灯/Lamp In Arms (11′ 44″) from Beijing 3-2 Chunyang Yao – Her/e (15′ 22″) from Guangzhou

Episodes 2 and 3 of Numbers Matter 121 present three artists from Japan and two artists from mainland China. Japan, you’ll recall from Episode 1, a country with a population of over 124.2 million, is ranked at 121 in the Gender Inequality Index (GII) published by Human Development Reports 2020. Japanese women got the vote in 1946 – earlier than China (1949), Liechtenstein (1984) and Switzerland (1993). China is ranked at 106 – two steps above South Korea at 108. Also related to the gender issue, the Chinese government introduced its two children policy instead of one in 2016, Both Chinese musicians in this programme have two children.

Meanwhile, 2021 in the UK is Brexit year one, pandemic year two and also the year of the national census. Indeed the 2021 census form raises plenty of reasons to talk about identity, given the section focussing on national identity, ethnic group, language and religion: “Your national identity could be the country or countries where you feel you belong or think of as home. It is not dependent on your ethnic group or citizenship”.

After winning the Nobel prize in 2017, the Nagasaki born ethnically Japanese British writer Kazuo Ishiguro commented: “I’ve always said throughout my career that although I’ve grown up in this country and I’m educated in this country, that a large part of my way of looking at the world, my artistic approach, is Japanese, because I was brought up by Japanese parents, speaking in Japanese […] I have always looked at the world through my parents’ eyes”.

IKLECTIK OFF SITE

Akio Suzuki

The Pyongyang born Japanese sound artist Akio Suzuki’s contribution to Numbers Matter 121 is a film of him playing his musical percussion invention, the Analapos, at Bakkokutsu, his self-built lakeside house in Kyotango in North Kyoto prefecture of Honshu. Because it stood empty for a long period, the building is presently almost ruined! Named after his house, “Bakkokutsu” was partly inspired by his longing for the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, China. It is also Akio’s homage to three UK free music pioneers: Hugh Davies (23 April 1943 – 1 January 2005), who was the first musician from the scene to recognise his work, when Akio participated in 1982’s Company Week, organised by Derek Bailey (29 January 1930 – 25 December 2005); and John Russell (19 December 1954 – 19 January 2021), who invited Akio to Fete Quaqua 2010 (see Helen Petts’ film of Akio Suzuki and John Russell’s performance:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2X7rkmNMnKk).

Hiromi Miyakita

Dancer Hiromi Miyakita was in Austria with her husband Akio Suzuki when the new Corona virus started spreading around Europe last year, forcing them to return to Japan earlier than they had planned. Surrounded by the natural beauty around their home in the remote region of Tango Peninsula, she developed her new dance “Nu Tu”, performed to her own simultaneously self-played rhythm on stones found on a local beach.

Miyakita received a BFA in dance at the University of Illinois in America. After performing and choreographing for the stage, she began to explore the possibilities of improvised performance and visual art. Her dance practice is based on the idea that any movement, even simple ones like standing, walking, or sitting, can all become dance; her choreography is also inspired by the objects and phenomena surrounding us. Miyakita moved to Kyōtango in 2012. Today, she creates site-specific performances in a variety of spaces including museums, railroads, parks, streets, and gardens.

Chiharu MK & Micelle

  Chiharu MK studied electronic acoustic music at INA/GRM and Francois Bayle’s sound diffusion system Acousmonium at MOTUS FUTURA in France. She returned to work in her hometown Sapporo, capital of Japan’s northernmost main island Hokkaido. She conceived and directed “Re:vive”, a dance/music work performed by Chiaki Kouno & Hiro Sakurai’s contemporary dance unit Micelle at Moerenuma Park, the Sapporo City public space designed by Japanese-American artist Isamu Noguchi.

Inspired by Hokkaido’s hard winters, “Re:vive” is the first part of Chiharu MK’s new composition “「Chain」”. Micelle’s “contact improvisation” dance style was influenced by Aikido, the Japanese martial art based on the communication between two or more moving bodies in physical contact. Once the two dancers tested negative for Covid-19, they saw their participation in “Re;vive” as a challenge how to dance under strict Covid-19 social distancing restrictions, asking: “What is the meaning of communicating through body?”

Chunyang Yao

The People’s Republic of China is the world’s most populous country. It recognises 55 different ethnic minority groups within its territory, including the Naxi, whose population is estimated at over 300,000 people. Born in Lijiang in Yunnan Province, Chunyang Yao is a composer, vocalist and electronic improviser of Naxi descent. After graduating from the Music Conservatory of Shanghai with a Master’s in Theory and Composition, she is now based in Guangzhou. In 2014, she launched her solo electronic music and voice performance project, which combines her native Naxi language, field recording and synthesizers, to stage improvised performances in the vein of music concrète, noise and drone.

Wei Wei aka VAVABOND

Wei Wei aka VAVABOND is a laptop noise/improvisation musician based in Beijing, who processes “meaningless and fragmented sounds in a nonlinear-time approach”. She is also a member of the psychedelic noise group Vagus Nerve and the free improvising environmental sound duo Mind Fiber. Wei Wei also works as an English translator – she co-translated the Chinese edition of Derek Bailey’s book “Improvisation: Its Nature And Practice In Music”.

In 2019, Wei Wei and Yao participated in the artist residency programme Art With/Out Small Children in the small town of Shiraoi, Hokkaido, Japan. Curated by Japanese sound designer Yasuhiro Morinaga and Lijiang Studio’s American director Jay Brown, Art With/Out Small Children’s theme was: “How do we deal with certain inescapable dynamics, such as countenancing a history of cultural erasure, tourist development, the cosmologies of others, or the ontologies of places?”

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NUMBERS MATTER 121

We have online streaming event from 9pm on 22 October 

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NUMBERS MATTER 121

チハルMK 、 おたこ、　川畑優、　AGF、　日野繭子、 大西蘭子

Thursday 22 October – 9pm (UK time) | Free

IKLECTIK YouTube Channel: https://youtu.be/HXFmH46kVEQ

Why numbers matter: Japan, a country with a population of over 124.2 million, is ranked at 121 in the Gender Inequality Index (GII) published by Human Development Reports 2020.  Japanese women got the vote in 1946 – earlier than China (1949), Liechtenstein (1984) and Switzerland (1993).

In the ranking chart of the Global Gender Gap 2020, the top ten reads as follows: 1: Iceland; 2: Norway; 3: Finland; 4: Sweden; 5: Nicaragua; 6: New Zealand; 7: Ireland; 8: Spain; 9: Rwanda; 10: Germany. The UK ranked 21, following Albania at number 20. Though Japan falls some 100 places behind the UK, the latter’s ranking at 21 is nothing to be proud of either. Clearly there is plenty of work to be done in both countries. Hence, NUMBERS MATTER 121 features four special projects led by Japanese women: Chiharu MK, Otaco, Yu Kawabata (in collaboration with German poemproducer AGF) and Mayuko Hino.

Footnote: In the Press Freedom Index published in 2020, Japan and the UK don’t fare much better than in the GII. Out of 180 countries listed, the UK is ranked at 33 and Japan at 66. The countries listed from one to ten are as follows: Norway, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Jamaica, Costa Rica, Switzerland, New Zealand, Portugal and Germany.

Programme:

“Paramnesia 2020” by CHIHARU MK “Tomodachi” by OTACO “Hamaderea Park ” by YU KAWABATA (sound) + AGF (visuals) “Toyosu 2020″ by MAYUKO HINO

Chiharu MK is from Sapporo. Primarily trained as a composer, she studied the acousmonium, that is, the sound diffusion system, at INA-GRM studio in Paris. Since completing her studies in 2002, she has become an internationally recognised electroacoustic sound artist, either performing or creating sound installations for festival, gallery or non-concert hall spaces in Europe, Hong Kong and Japan. For Intersect 2015, she commissioned the non-Japanese artists Francisco López, Sogar and Taylor Deupree to compose sounds for a 17.1 multi Channel Speaker System (consisting of seven speakers + ten screen speakers + one woofer) in Sapporo city centre’s underground walkway. Chiharu MK has also released three solo CDs: https://www.studio-cplus.net/

Chiharu MK’s new multimedia work Paramnesia 2020 is based on her original piece for Hong Kong Art Centre’s 40th anniversary multi-channel Sound Forms festival in 2018.

This film shows her performing the piece inside Glass Pyramid, nicknamed Hidamari – Japanese for Sunny Spot, it’s the centrepiece of Sapporo’s Moerenuma Park, designed by Japanese American sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988). Construction work on the park actually began in the year Noguchi died, and it opened in 2005. The film also shows Chiharu MK recording on Ishikari beach, just north of Sapporo.

Taking her name from tako, the Japanese word for octopus, Otaco is originally from Japan’s northernmost main island Hokkaido. An electronic musician and vocalist, Otaco is one of the most vibrant and engaging performers to emerge from the alternative music scene anywhere in Japan.

Now living in Tokyo, she operates a home studio set-up of a rhythm box with a synthesizer; she samples and syncs sounds into a computer, running them into real-time sequences to construct her outre pop-electronica songs and instrumentals. Her music can be heard at https://otacosan.bandcamp.com/music. Otaco also plays guitar when she leads Gotou, an occasional rock trio formed out of homage to early 1980s West Berlin groups Mania D and Malaria!. She appeared for the first time in the UK during Coding In GE 2018 festival for women and technology.

Antye Greie also know as AGF was born and raised in East Germany. She is a vocalist, digital songwriter, producer, performer, e-poet, calligrapher, digital media artist. In the last decade Greie has released more than 20 full length records and played over 300 live performances worldwide. AGF runs her own production company AGF Production  – http://antyegreie.com She first worked with Yu Kawabata on her 2015 album A Deep Mysterious Tone, the third in AGF’s series of settings and poetry interpretations from different countries, this one featuring Japanese poets and writers including Noe Ito, Fumiko Kaneko, Shikubu Izumi, Blue Stocking editor and writer Hiratsuka Raicho, and more.

Yu Kawabata is a techno DJ active in Japan and Russia. This is Yu and AGF’s second collaboration. On their first, AGF set to music Yu’s reading of a waka poem, written by the 12th century court lady Yūshi Naishinnō-ke no Kii, enumerated as one of the Thirty-Six Female Immortals of Poetry. On their latest, Yu has created new music for a film by AGF. https://soundcloud.com/yukawabata

Since resuming music in 2011 after a ten year break to study Chinese medicine, Mayuko Hino has reclaimed her status as queen of noise.

A prolific live performer, Hino is best known for C.C.C.C. (Cosmic Coincidence Control Center), the group she formed in 1990 with Hiroshi Hasegawa, Fumio Kosakai and Ryuichi Nagakubo. In their early phase, the band grabbed attention by combining noise music with Hino’s sadomasochism performances using bondage ropes and dripping candle wax. Hino has since been a member of Mne-Mic, DFH-M3 and her most recent group Transparentz with Akira Sakata, who split up in January 2020.

Whether solo or in her various group projects, Hino experiments with the function of noise music as a transdisciplinary medium, in the process to breaking the boundaries surrounding performance art: urban structure against man, art against non art, activity versus rest.

In 2018 Mayuko Hino performed at Iklectic’s Coding In GE Festival alongside and in collaboration with Ramleh. The same year she released her second solo album Lunisolar. In addition to self-made instruments, Hino plays noise with her six-theremin oscillators (in bright pink), a unique device specially made for her by Ryo Araishi (aka ichion)

This year Hino had planned to resume activities with C.C.C.C. to mark the US reissue of their first four albums, but unfortunately their plans had to be put on hold because of the pandemic.

“There’s a sense of momentum to be found in Hino’s noise; it’s rarely static… At the hands of Hino it seems astral travelling is as much out-of-this-world as it is an out-of-body experience… on Lunisolar she continues with the ever evolving atmospheric and psychedelic sound that energised the noise of C.C.C.C.” (Compulsion Online)

“Hino Mayuko makes no bones about her wide-ranging noisician flexibility here, nor her honored place in the contemporary Japanoise scene… Unlike a bevy of artists who just make ear-splitting sonic somersaults, Hino’s sound is more impressionistic and staggered in its delivery, incorporating a yin/yang of the industrial and environmental.” (Tone-Shift)

RANKO ONISHI (Mne-mic): voice

Performing artist Ranko Onishi was born in Hokkaido. She moved to Tokyo where she joined Shuji Terayama’s Tenjo Sajiki theatre company in 1980. She was a second year student of dancer Min Tanaka in 1982 and became a full member of Tanaka’s company in 1984. Five years later in 1989 she performed with Keiji Haino. She and Hino work together in the duo Mne-mic, featuring Hino on electronics, Theremin and synthesizer, and Onishi on voice, water and fogphone. Their album Gulf Stream was released by Alchemy Records in 1999.

Curator Keiko Yoshida’s notes for NUMBERS MATTER 121

While researching texts for AGF’s 2015 CD A Deep Mysterious Tone I developed a profound interest in women’s history in Japan. AGF and I first met and begain talking about her project while she was taking part in my hometown Sapporo’s International Arts Festival in 2014. For the album she compiled and set to music Japanese writings and poems from the ninth century to the present day, and commissioned the female electronic musicians Ryoko Akama (UK), Kyoka (Germany), Tujiko Noriko (France) and Yu Kawabata to read her selections. She had met them at European festivals, and as she got to know them she learnt these female electronic musicians are not treated very well when they’re back home in Japan.

Indeed NUMBERS MATTER 121 took seed in these discussions on women and Japan with AGF. In some ways it’s also a sequel to “Coding in GE”, the 2018 Iklectik festival offering a platform to female electronic musicians, for which we got funding from Sasakawa Foundation UK, and in which Otaco, Mayuko Hino and AGF participated.

Another question addressed in NUMBERS MATTER 121 is the subject of decentralisation.  I consciously asked musicians from outside Tokyo to participate in this project.

Currently working on a photo story book about 1980s London and Berlin.

Please support the project buying an e-ticket (#nameyourprice). ** https://buytickets.at/iklectik/439711 **

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MUSHIMARU FUJIEDA

Dancer, Choreographer, Director

In 1989, after having performed in several Japanese theatre productions, Mushimaru Fujieda  (b. 1952) started to dance solo, utilising movement in relationship to breath and rhythm.

He spent several months performing in the Taklamakan Desert in Xinjiang, northwest China, and in the streets of Tibet and Soviet Russia in 1990. He created his unique style of movement, which he calls “Tennen Nikutai Shi” (“The Physical Poets”) – the name coming to him after meeting and collaborating with Allen Ginsberg in 1991.

As an actor, scriptwriter, producer, writer and director, his list of works includes the masked dance-drama Sou Ramayana (using masks of Himalayan religious ceremonies). He has created and performed numerous special works, including Art Battle A-Un-Gi, Moonlight Celebration and Chance Operation, in Japan, various countries in Europe, South Korea, the UK, the USA, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Hong Kong and India.

In Japan he has appeared regularly on TV and radio, and he has published travel pieces in newspapers and magazines. He is also a lecturer at the National School of Drama in Agartala, India.

Mushimaru Fujieda is the subject of Nicolas Norblin's documentary film The Shadow:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mcg0Ebcm81o

Following event will be rescheduled due to due to the coronavirus (covid-19)

On 22 May Mushimaru Fujieda will be collaborating with 

AYA OGAWA

Pianist, vocalist, educator and artist Aya Ogawa lives in Hakodate, Hokkaido. She started playing piano in 1968 and has been involved in theatre since 1970. Ogawa is also a songwriter, organiser of poetry readings and publisher of picture books. These experiences inform her improvisations, which include work with Japanese and international musicians and dancers such as Sabu Toyozumi, Peter Brötzmann, Charlie Collins and Deku Ogawa, and Butoh dancers Hal Tanaka, Mushimaru Fujieda, Atsushi Takenouchi and Tukasa Kamidate. She toured Poland, Germany, the UK and Japan with the Polish–Japanese audio-visual dance project Butoh Techno.

PASCAL SAVY

A sound artist and performer based in London. He started making music in the late 1990s influenced by early techno and experimental electronic music. Over the last decade he has explored sparser and calmer territories, often reflecting on time, presence and the elusiveness of reality. In parallel to his interest in more minimal and quieter music, he has been heavily influenced by the writings of the late cultural and political theorist Mark Fisher and has in consequence explored more reactive and politically charged terrains. His recent album Dislocations (Experimedia, May 2018) was conceptualised and articulated around the concepts and ideas developed in Capitalist Realism, a book in which Fisher surveys and analyses the symptoms of our current cultural and political malaise.

Natural Physical Poetry Workshop on 23 & 24 May 2020

In this workshop, students will explore movement in relationship to their breathing rhythm, which Mushimaru believes is highly individual and the most basic approach for accessing and generating one’s own unique dance. Through personal expression, participants will search to rediscover the playfulness of the inner child, free from more normalised codes of gesture. Mushimaru’s method is an effective tool for developing sensitivity as a dancer in order to both integrate and release the mind-body. The workshop is open to people of all ages and abilities, as well as all levels of experience of movement and dance.

Come join us to explore your own natural poetry through motion!

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Lecture at Biratori on 15 October 2019

Sapporo in 1984 

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Tadashi Kawamata  at Annely Juda Fine Art

Destruction / Reconstruction    until 20 December 2019

His fifth exhibition with the gallery, Kawamata will exhibit a selection of his recent “maquettes” along with a chopstick nest, a film projection and a site-specific work that will be lowered into the gallery via the glass roof during the opening.

Kawamata makes works from reclaimed wood.  Often working on site-specific projects made in situ by the artist and local assistants, his sculptural installations are direct responses to their environment. Existing somewhere between art and architecture, Kawamata’s installations appear to grow independently out of their surroundings and give rise to questions about traditional forms of shelter and the effect of socio-economic contexts on the built environment.   His works are both structurally solid yet fragile, and give the deliberately ambiguous impression of both construction and deconstruction.

Kawamata’s “maquettes” are in fact wall-based, three-dimensional works that do not necessarily relate directly to his site-specific projects but are works in their own right. They blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture, often protruding 20-30cm from the wall in undulating irregularity.  The maquettes in this exhibition, many titled ‘Destruction’, evoke images of the desolation caused to urban cities and towns, be it through war or natural disaster (as illustrated in the artist’s film of a collection of newspaper clippings on such events).  Yet the presence of the artist’s signature bird nests and tree huts point to the possibility of reconstruction and protective shelter.  In their raw materiality, these works invite us to re-evaluate and consider the fragility of our everyday built surroundings.

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Ami Yamasaki 

Winter Solstice Light-Worship 2018 Enoura Observatory by Hiroshi Sugimoto

10 November Bratislava (Slovakia)     Fuga 18 November Dartington (UK)             Aller Park Studios

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Graham Duff -  Foreground Music: A Life in Fifteen Gigs

A book launch by Strange Attractor press at Iklectik in London  

Conversation with film maker Adam Curtis DJ set by Vicki Bennett / People Like us Friday 8 November – doors 7.30pm – start 8pm | £5 The memoir of a life long music obsessive and compulsive gig-goer. From a Cliff Richard gospel concert at the age of ten, to his first rock gig age 14, where The Jam play so loudly he blacks out, to a Joy Division concert that erupts into a full scale riot. Each chapter focuses on a different show, including Primal Scream headlining at Glastonbury at the height of Screamadelica, the troubled reformation of The Velvet Underground, the first UK gig by The Strokes in a room above a pub, and the final arena tour by David Bowie. Along the way, Graham experiences several pub-crawls with Mark E. Smith of The Fall, convinces Paul Weller to undertake his first acting role and attempts to interview Genesis P. Orridge of Throbbing Gristle whilst tripping on LSD. “‘Foreground Music’ is an absolute gem.” – Mark Gatiss Published in Autumn 2019 by Strange Attractor Press. They say about the book… “Foreground Music is an absolute gem. Charming, very funny and often achingly melancholy, Graham Duff’s memoir is suffused with a genuine passion for live music and its (occasionally eccentric) power.” —Mark Gatiss “Touching and funny” – Cosey Fanni Tutti “A must have for those of us who escaped our parents’ terrible musical tastes. A love letter to the music and period that defined a generation. Full of joy and pathos, it left me yearning for a world before ‘X Factor’ when music was about something.” – Steve Coogan “Smashing Stuff. If you want to bluff I was there, read this.” – Vic Reeves Foreground Music is the result of a lifetime’s passion for gig-going by one of British television’s most individual writers.  From a Cliff Richard gospel concert at the age of 10, to his first rock show aged 14, where The Jam play so loudly he blacks out, to a Joy Division gig which erupts into a full-scale riot. Vivid, insightful and very funny, each chapter covers a different gig, including Primal Scream headlining Glastonbury at the height of Screamadelica, and the troubled reformation of The Velvet Underground. Taking in the first UK headline gig by The Strokes in a room above a pub, and the final arena tour by David Bowie. Along the way Duff experiences pub-crawls with Mark E. Smith of The Fall, convinces Paul Weller to undertake his first acting role and attempts to interview Genesis P. Orridge of Throbbing Gristle whilst tripping on LSD. Foreground Music captures the power of life-changing gigs, whilst tracing the evolution of 40 years of musical movements and subcultures. But more than that, it’s an honest, touching and witty story of friendship, love, creativity and mortality, and a testimony to music’s ability to inspire and heal. Graham Duff is a British TV comedy and drama scriptwriter whose credits include Ideal and The Nightmare Worlds of H.G. Wells. As an actor he has appeared in, among other things, two Harry Potter films, Alan Partridge, and Dr. Who. Often taking inspiration from the worlds of music, horror, sci-fi and art house cinema, Graham’s scripts mix genres and cross boundaries. They also attract some of the biggest names in British comedy, including Steve Coogan, Johnny Vegas, Mark Gatiss, Julia Davis, Sean Lock and Simon Pegg. Graham script edited seven series of Radio 4’s Sony Award winning COUNT ARTHUR STRONG’S RADIO SHOW, as well as the Alan Partridge film ALPHA PAPA. He also writes about music and art and has published articles in The Guardian and Wire magazine. http://www.grahamduff.co.uk Adam Curtis Adam Curtis is an acclaimed, BAFTA-award winning documentary film maker whose works, including 'Hypernormalisation' and 'The Power of Nightmares' explore areas of sociology, psychology, philosophy and political history.

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UK tour 2019

13th November  -  Huddersfield, ame @ Small Seeds　

Yamasaki / Collins duo

Yamasaki / Collins / Derek Saw trio

15th November -  Sheffield @  Access Space

Yamasaki / Collins duo

The evening will begin with a trio of Lyn Hodnett / Helen Papaioannou / Derek Saw

17th November -  London @ IKLECTIK

Yamasaki / Collins duo

Yamasaki / Collins / Beatrix Ward-Fernandez / Derek Saw quartet

The evening will begin with O Yama O and Lauren Sarah Hayes.

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Talk with live music at Iklectik on 12 June 2019                  7h30pm

Irrational Music meets Nightingales in Berlin 

Elliott Sharp and David Rothenberg meet in words and music concerning their two recent books, Irrational Music and Nightingales in Berlin. 

The event will be moderated by Jem Finer.

Elliott Sharp is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer. A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City for over 30 years, released over eighty-five recordings ranging from orchestral music to blues, jazz, noise, no wave rock, and techno music. He has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction. His collaborators have included Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt; Manuel Göttsching, Ensemble Modern; Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Kronos String Quartet; blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples; pipa virtuoso Min-Xiao Feng; jazz greats Jack DeJohnette, Oliver Lake, and Sonny Sharrock; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians Of Jajouka. Sharp is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2014 Fellow at Parson's Center for Transformative Media. He received the 2015 Berlin Prize in Musical Composition from the American Academy in Berlin.

Musician and philosopher David Rothenberg wrote Why Birds Sing, Bug Music, Survival of the Beautiful and many other books, published in at least eleven languages. He has more than twenty CDs out, including One Dark Night I Left My Silent House which came out on ECM, and most recently Berlin Bülbul and Cool Spring. He has performed or recorded with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, Suzanne Vega, Scanner, Elliot Sharp, Iva Bittová, and the Karnataka College of Percussion.  Nightingales in Berlin is his latest book, CD, and film. Rothenberg is Distinguished Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. 

Jem Finer is an artist, musician and composer. Since studying computer science in the 1970s, he has worked in a variety of fields, including photography, film, experimental and popular music and installation.  His 1000 year long musical composition Longplayer represents a convergence of many of his concerns, particularly those relating to systems, long-durational processes and extremes of scale in both time and space. Recent work, focusing on his interest in long-term sustainability and the reconfiguring of older technologies, includes Spiegelei, a 360-degree spherical camera obscura and Supercomputer, a sculptural machine composing micro-minimal musical scores which opened in Cambridge in June 2014 and is now sited in London.  

£ 6 advance    £ 8 door

Nightingales in Berlin: Searching for the Perfect Sound

A celebrated figure in myth, song, and story, the nightingale has captivated the imagination for millennia, its complex song evoking a prism of human emotions—from melancholy to joy, from the fear of death to the immortality of art.

But have you ever listened closely to a nightingale’s song? It’s a strange and unsettling sort of composition—an eclectic assortment of chirps, whirs, trills, clicks, whistles, twitters, and gurgles. At times it is mellifluous, at others downright guttural. It is a rhythmic assault, always eluding capture. What happens if you decide to join in?

David Rothenberg shows in this searching and personal new book, the nightingale’s song is so exceptional in part because it reflects our own cacophony back at us. As vocal learners, nightingales acquire their music through the world around them, singing amid the sounds of humanity in all its paradoxes of noise and beauty, hard machinery and soft melody. Rather than try to capture a sound not made for us to understand, Rothenberg seeks these musical creatures out, clarinet in tow, and makes a new music with them. He takes us to the urban landscape of Berlin—longtime home to nightingale colonies where the birds sing ever louder in order to be heard—and invites us to listen in on their remarkable collaboration as birds and instruments riff off of each other’s sounds. Through dialogue, travel records, sonograms, tours of Berlin’s city parks, and musings on the place animal music occupies in our collective imagination, Rothenberg takes us on a quest for a new sonic alchemy, a music impossible for any one species to make alone. In the tradition of The Hidden Life of Trees and The Invention of Nature, Rothenberg has written a provocative and accessible book to attune us ever closer to the natural world around us.

UK publication by University of Chicago Press  on 4 June  2019   £20

IrRational Music

For over five decades, Elliott Sharp has been engaged in a quest at once quixotic and down to earth: to take the music he hears in his inner ear and bring it to life in the real world. In this vivid memoir and manifesto, Sharp takes us along on that quest, through some of the most rugged, anarchically fertile cultural terrain of our time. Sharp, a mainstay of the New York Downtown scene beginning in the 1980s, has been a pivotal gure at the junction of rock, experimental music, and an ever-widening spiral of art, theater, lm, and dance. Rooted in blues, rock, jazz, and the twentieth-century avant-garde, Sharp’s innovative music has encom- passed fractal geometry, chaos theory, algorithms, genetic metaphors, and new strategies for graphic notation.

In IrRational Music, Sharp dodges fake cowboys’ real bullets by the side of a highway near Colby, Kansas; is called on the carpet (“Improvisation. . . I don’t buy it”) by a prickly, pompadoured Morton Feldman; segues from Zen tea to single malt with an elfin John Cage; conjures an extraterrestrial opera from a group of high-school students in Munich; and—back in his own high-school days—looks up from strumming Van Morrison’s “Gloria” in Manny’s Music on 48th Street to see Jimi Hendrix smiling benignly upon him. A mix of tales from the road with thoughts on music, art, politics, technology, and the process of thinking itself, IrRational Music is a glimpse inside the mind of one of our most exacting, exciting creative artists.

Terra Nova Press / MIT Press    £ 20

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BUTOH RESIDENCY DAY 3                    Sunday 19 May 2019                                                 

Mushimaru Fujieda Workshop on “Natural Physical Poetry” accompany by Aya Ogawa at IKLECTIK in London

Time:  13h00 - 18h00                                                 £ 45.- per person 

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BUTOH RESIDENCY  offers three days of live performances, films and a workshop that see Japanese and European musicians, dancers and artists working together to advance the global recognition of Butoh – both as a uniquely Japanese art form and as a vibrant international platform for communicating in or beyond all languages. Collaborating artists include pianist and vocalist Aya Ogawa and dancer Mushimaru Fujieda from Japan;  French electronic musician Pascal Savy and, on film, performances by the late Sapporo based dancer Yoko Muronoi.

Venue:  IKLECTIK in London

Friday 17 May

We are pround to screen film of the late Sapporo based Japanese dancer Yoko Muronoi (1958���2017) in performance. Some footage was shot during her short visit to London while on a European tour with her partner, the legendary Japanese underground drummer and musician Ikuro Takahashi in December 2003. Yoko and Ikuro’s joint project was called Anoyo no dekigoto in Japanese, which translates as 'happenings in the other world'.Their Leeds appearance made a big impact on UK journalist Abi Bliss, who wrote about it four years later in The Wire 276, a special issue published in 2007 dedicated to Seismic Performances.

Yoko returned to the UK to perform at The Sage Gateshead on 12 May 2007.

UK artist Holly Warburton has made a new film about Yoko from the footage she shot of the volcanic landscape of Hokkaido Noboribetsu in 2015, and Yoko's performance at Sapporo City’s first international art festival in 2014. A collection of Yoko Muronoi’s writings was published by Ikuro Takahashi's Zarigania imprint in 2018.

Coincidentally, Yoko was born in Yokohama where Butoh founder Kazuo Ohno died on 1 June 2010. Iklectik’s Butoh Residency musician Aya Ogawa comes from Hokkaido’s major port Hakodate, where Kazuo Ohno was born on 27 October 1906  

DAY 2

                                                                                              Friday 17 May 2019 

Part One: a film show of rare footage paying tribute to the late Sapporo based dancer Yoko Muronoi (1959–2017), whose work included performances in the UK with her musician partner Ikuro Takahashi (as Anoyonodekigoto). Plus a film-in-progress of Yoko Muronoi in performance by London based artist Holly Warburton.

Part Two: Dancer Mushimaru Fujieda performing to sound by Pascal Savy and Aya Ogawa

Pascal Savy is a French sound artist and performer based in London. He started making music in the late nineties influenced by early techno and experimental electronic music. Over the last decade he has explored sparser and calmer territories, often reflecting on time, presence and the elusiveness of reality. In parallel to his interest in more minimal and quiet music, he has been heavily influenced by the writings of cultural and political theorist Mark Fisher and has in consequence explored more reactive and politically charged terrains. His recent album ‘Dislocations’, released on Experimedia in May 2018, was conceptualised and articulated around the concepts and ideas developed in ‘Capitalist Realism’ in which Fisher surveys and analyses the symptoms of our current cultural and political malaise.

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BUTOH RESIDENCY  offers three days of live performances, films and a workshop that see Japanese and European musicians, dancers and artists working together to advance the global recognition of Butoh – both as a uniquely Japanese art form and as a vibrant international platform for communicating in or beyond all languages. Collaborating artists include pianist and vocalist Aya Ogawa and dancer Mushimaru Fujieda from Japan;  Butoh-Techno from Poland, French electronic musician Pascal Savy and, on film, performances by the late Sapporo based dancer Yoko Muronoi. 

IKLECTIK in London

DAY 1                                                                              15 MAY 2019 (WED) 

BUTOH-TECHNO 

Door open:  7h30 pm  

Formed three years ago out of a collaboration between the Poland based Shepherds of Cats and Japanese pianist and vocalist Aya Ogawa, Butoh-Techno is an international dance and sound spectacle bringing together the aforementioned improv ensemble, Maciej Piatek aka VJ Pietrushka, saxophonist/composer Matylda Gerber, Butoh dancer Mushimaru Fujieda and Aya Ogawa.

Adv £12 / Door £15

Limited combination ticket is availalble with event on 17 May @ £ 17.- 

                                                                               (photo by Aleksandra Zegar)

MUSHIMARU FUJIEDA

Born in 1952 in Aichi Prefecture, Mushimaru Fujieda is now based on the rainforest island of Yakushima in Japan. He began working in drama in 1972 and then joined Ishin-ha company in 1978. Since 1989 he has gone out as an independent solo performer inside and outside of Japan. After receiving the highest praise from the late, great American poet, artist and activist Allen Ginsberg, Mushimaru was inspired to redefine his work as that of a Natural Physical Poet. In 1997 he received the Tobita Drama Award for “Most Excellent Improvised Dance”. His other activities have included: a mask dance-drama for Himalayan religious ceremonies, collaborations and theatrical presentations with, among others, Finnish avant garde drummer Edward Vesala and American poet Allen Ginsberg; appearances at Rainbow 2000 techno festival in Japan, Juksan International Arts Festival in Korea and on television on the Kyoto Satellite Channel, Asian Performing Arts Now in Japan with dancer Edwin Lung, and with the Korean company Paekche under Professor Sung-Sik Chang. 

AYA OGAWA 

Pianist, vocalist, educator and artist Aya Ogawa lives in Hakodate, Hokkaido. She started playing piano in 1968 and has been involved in theatre since 1970. Ogawa is also a songwriter, organiser of poetry readings and publisher of picture books. These experiences inform her improvisations, which include work with Japanese and international musicians and dancers such as Sabu Toyozumi, Peter Brötzmann and Deku Ogawa, and Butoh dancers Hal Tanaka, Mushimaru Fujieda, Atsushi Takenouchi and Tukasa Kamidate.

https://soundcloud.com/aya-ogawa-3

SHEPHERDS OF CATS 

Shepherds are: Aleksander Olszewski (ethnic percussion),  Adam Webster (cello, voice), Jan Fanfare (guitar, loops, voice),  Dariusz Blaszczak (synthesizers and electronics)

MATYLDA GERBER 

saxophone player from Wroclaw

MACIEJ PIĄTEK  aka VJ Pietrushka

Video artist 

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Barbara Morgenstern - Hands Dance

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Maps of Ezo, Sakhalin, and Kuril Islands                                                        

This map was made by Fujita Junsai and published by Harimaya Katsugorō in 1854, around the time period when the Tokugawa shogunate started sending expeditions to the area of Ezo, Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. Russia was also showing interest in this area at this time. Place names are identified and indicated in the Japanese katakana characters (the angular Japanese phonetic syllabary). Various land and sea routes in the Ezo area (now Hokkaido) are shown in detail.            

Fearing the influx of Christianity and foreign forces, in the Edo period (1603–1867) Japan prohibited foreign travel by Japanese people and trade and traffic with other countries, apart from Korea, China, and Holland. In 1828, Philipp Franz Balthasar von Siebold, a German who had come to Japan to work as a doctor at the Dutch trading post, tried to take some prohibited items, including maps of Japan, back to Holland when he completed his posting. Siebold was deported and barred from returning to Japan, while Takahashi Kageyasu (1785−1829, popularly known as Sakuzaemon), the Japanese official from the Astronomy Bureau of the Shogunate who had given Siebold the maps, was executed. All in all, 50 more people were punished for the incident. This map of Ezo (present-day Hokkaido, also seen as Yezo) is believed to be the original of the map that Takahashi gave Siebold. It is almost identical to “Die Insel Jezo und die Japanischen Kurilen, nach einer Originalkarte von Takahasi Sakusaimon, Hofastronomen zu Jedo” (Ezoshima and the Japanese Kuril Islands, based on an original map by Takahashi Sakuzaemon, court astronomer at Edo), which was published as an accompanying map in Nippon, a seven-volume work about Japan by Siebold. There is also a label, believed to date from the investigation of the incident, bearing an inscription asserting that the map (that Takahashi gave Siebold) was an exact copy of this one. The map is affixed with an ownership stamp of the Shōheizaka Academy, which was the educational institution of the Edo Shogunate.