After "
Spontaneous Music" in 2018, Edition Telemark presents "Space Music" by Japanese Fluxus artist Takako Saito. Similarly to the previous LP, the recordings featured here deal with everyday things and actions which Saito transforms through unique and deliberately crafted artistic interventions. For "Space Music", pieces were selected whose acoustic outcomes involve the characteristics of the spaces in which they were recorded.
Side A features two performances from 2020 in the church Kunst-Station Sankt Peter in Cologne: In "Klangkleid", Saito and co-performers Bei Li Zhou and Thomas Rhiemeier move and dance in Saito's sound dresses – jumpsuits onto which she sewed empty plastic and metal packagings to produce sounds while moving. For "Kugelmusik" ("ball music"), she chose balls made from various materials and asked audience members to roll them across the floor towards each other.
Side B contains a selection of 1980s recordings that had been left out on "Spontaneous Music" and are arranged here as a sound walk: After "Chewing" ("Kauen") at her kitchen table, Saito steps outside onto the construction site "Böhlerweg" near her home to record her voice in a former factory building. Finally, she walks on the street ("Auf der Straße") towards the Oberkassel district of Düsseldorf to buy her daily needs.
Edition of 300 including one insert with liner notes and three postcards. The sleeve and the postcards feature a series of drawings by Takako Saito from 1985.
Takako Saito (born 1929) is a Japanese artist closely related with
Fluxus. In the 1950s, she participated in the “Creative Art Education” movement where she met later Fluxus fellow Ay-O. In 1963, she moved to New York where she was introduced to
George Maciunas and became an important member of the Fluxus movement. She remained part of it throughout the 1960s and 1970s and collaborated with numerous Fluxus artists. Since 1968, Saito has been living mostly in Europe. In 1979, she moved to Germany and now lives in Düsseldorf.
Much of her work revolves around everyday life and everyday things, to which she adds her unique artistic gesture through small but deliberate and carefully crafted interventions. Many of her pieces involve the participation of viewers and only become complete when the audience fills a co-designing role. A sense of playfulness is evident throughout her work, seen in many of her performances and particularly in her various “free” chess games that come in a multitude of different shapes and moreover display a high level of craftsmanship.
In line with her general artistic approach, Saito recorded a number of musical pieces between 1982 and 1992. Retrospectively, she called these recordings “Spontaneous Music” because they involved very simple actions with voice and everyday objects that happened spontaneously. Some recordings have become part of sound pieces in her exhibition “Games” at Emily Harvey Gallery in New York in 1990, but none of them have been released so far. A selection from the recordings is published here for the first time.
