Percussion by Paris-based Japanese improviser Seijiro Murayama and field recordings by sound artist Éric La Casa, "small, simple gestures" on the threshold of the musical, a low-key presence, listening to inhabited spaces.
"Whether playing percussion or recording, when do our gestures become musical? Where, within each space, is the threshold of the extraordinary, and therefore of the musical? Isn't this what making an event consists of? Deliberately interrupting the continuity of the ordinary. What is sure is that our small, simple, repeated gestures do produce a series of frictions with this ordinariness, gradually leading to slight discontinuities that significantly alter the course of daily life.
The ordinary ceases to be continuous, and through our action assumes another state whose nature remains to be defined. We think that the spaces—temporal, almost physical—we open up in the life of the place both modify and reinforce how we listen to it. A slight increase of our attention to certain environmental characteristics produces a significant change in the way we listen to space and time in everyday life—yet one whose meaning escapes us."
Limited edition of 150 copies.
For more than 20 years, while listening to the environment, Éric La Casa (born 1968, Tours, lives and works in Paris) has been questioning the perception of reality and has expanded the notion of what's musical today. Through his aesthetic of capturing sound, his work fits equally into the fields of sound art and music. As a result of his in situ listening processes, he creates forms (of attention) that creep into the venues, slowly infuse there, and become other possible spaces. In the same way that the letter stimulates a country's reading, the in situ aesthetic object renews our relationship to space and landscape.
Seijiro Murayama (born 1957 in Nagasaki) is a percussionist and drummer. In 1982, he toured the United States with
Keiji Haino, and during his stay in New York immediately after that , he encountered the radical, provocating music of
John Zorn. After coming back to Japan, through the explosive sound trio Absolute Null Punkt, under the influence of Akira Aida, Kenichi Takeda, Masami Akita, the magazine Transonic, musicians
Derek Bailey, Kaoru Abe, etc., he embarked on an exploration of improvisation. Although he temporarily refrained from performing due to doubts about the styles of the first generation of improvisers he had followed, he restarted playing, thanks to the movements such as Onkyo in Japan, named by certain foreign critic in the 90's. In 99, he had the opportunity to live and work in France, that changed his way of thinking and playing, he began to concentrate in particular on solo improvisation, which had been a long-standing challenge. Today, he mainly performs in solo, duo and trio formats. As for collaborations with other fields' artists, he notes that even if he has experiences quite a lot of sorts of collaborations with dance and theater, his current interest is more towards words and images, but finally it depends on what kind of person the Other is.
