December 16, 2023
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Ukrainian Field Notes

Gianmarco Del Re (Editor)
система | system Pbk 567 pp

Ukrainian Field Notes was initiated by film maker Gianmarco Del Re, who became interested in Ukrainian experimental music after the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, but started researching the country’s diverse scenes more intensively after the Russian invasion in February 2022. His interviews with Ukrainian musicians took a diaristic day by day approach and were initially published on the website A Closer Listen. Some questions raised pragmatic concerns like how Westerners can support the Ukrainian war effort, while others focused on how artists manage their creative process in times of conflict.

The project is still ongoing, but 170 interviews from the first year of the war have been compiled into this single tome. A sister compilation featuring some of the artists involved has also been released by c  cTeMa | system. Including over 80 tracks running to almost eight hours, the compilation follows the chronological order of the interviews. Recorded after 24 February 2022, the overall sensation of the music is sombre reflection.

Although the tracklist is dominated by instrumental electronic compositions, other genres and moods also make an appearance. They range from the thundering drums and protracted metal dirge of Nonsun (“Days Of Thunder Bring New Wisdom”), through the melancholy dark jazz of Whaler (“Zrada”), to sorrowful field recordings. Documenting squawking birds on a winter day, Myroslav Protsan’s “Ravens On The Cemetery” suggests the harsh emptiness of grief.

The combined reading and listening experience brings to the surface emotions from the first days of the war: a sickening disbelief in the unfolding events. In the early stages of the conflict many interviewees couldn’t make or listen to music. Their energies instead focused on survival, fundraising and volunteering. Del Re equates war to another recent trauma, that of the global pandemic, and asks how the artists lived during that time. “There is a big difference between lockdown and war,” replies Hanna Svirska. “During lockdown you knew that you would survive by staying at home. War gives you no guarantees.”

About 50 pages into the book, the interviews expand. Gianmarco’s questions become more involved and better researched. Further insights are gained into the experience of displaced artists (across Europe and within Ukraine) as well as the country’s different music scenes. SA Tweeman, for example, the co-founder of queer rave VESELKA, is asked to reflect on the development of Ukraine’s LGBTQIA+ club scene and whether electronic music has a role to play in the current situation.

Each artist is also tasked with recommending a book or film that will give readers a better understanding of Ukrainian culture. Sergei Loznitsa’s Donbass (2018), Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows Of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) and the Ukraïner media platform are recommended simultaneously by several different people. Later conversations consider misconceptions about the conflict. “The West thinks that we are at war with people who have human concepts, values and orientations,” say the indie five-piece Latexfauna. “In fact, we are fighting against a completely inhumane, misanthropic system that is endless in its bloodlust.”

Although it makes for emotionally charged reading, Ukrainian Field Notes is an important document with a practical purpose. All proceeds from its sales go to fund the Musicians Defend Ukraine charity.
Almost two years into this war, the book’s publication is all the more vital.

Ilia Rogatchevski
Originally published by The Wire, December 2023

December 10, 2023
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Midori Takada: Japan On Film

Kings Place, London, UK
Photo: Monika S. Jakubowska

The dark stage is peppered with cymbals that resemble flowers gazing at an artificial sun. A solitary bell is heard but its source is unclear. Midori Takada emerges from an aisle and ascends onto the stage, intermittently striking an upturned metal bowl. She walks through the field of alloy disks, picking between them, emphasising their tonal differences, before stopping at a suspended gong. Various textures are drawn from it. Takada scrapes the surface with brushes, then her thumb, persuading the instrument to sing like a migrating whale. She removes her black cloak, letting it drop to the floor – a deliberate gesture bookending her theatrical entrance.

Tonight’s performance centres around new scores for silent films about Japan. These surviving shorts, which are held at the BFI National Archive, date back to the end of the Meiji era, when Western film makers fixed their collective gaze on the country. Captured by outsiders at the dawn of the 20th century, Japan’s landscapes, buildings, fashions, customs and people are inevitably exoticised. However, the films remain vital records of a nation transitioning into modernity, and their restoration and digitisation was done to coincide with the 2020/21 Tokyo Olympics.

Takada’s live score makes full use of the percussive palette incorporating cymbals, variously pitched toms, marimba, grand piano and prerecorded sounds. The emphasis is always on the melodic potential of the instruments, particularly where the drums are concerned. Two of the toms are turned sideways, positioned at head height, while the remaining drums rest on the floor. Takada darts across them, with each isolated hit conjuring up an unexpected melodious note. Collectively, her rolls are evocative of countless liberated cobblestones flying across city barricades and raining fast onto the street.

As images of the Dotonbori Canal in Osaka flash upon the screen, Takada moves over to the marimba. Her complex repeating patterns instantly remind me of Philip Glass or, more precisely, Christoph Sietzen’s marimba rendering of the Glassworks track “Opening”. Whereas that piece is steeped in a fragile melancholy, Takada’s playing is vibrant, especially when synced to visions of urban life lost to time: people under parasols escaping the rain, street food vendors, a bonsai tree market, children lining up for school, silk factories, a parade celebrating the country’s victory in the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese War.

The most arresting film is The Ainus Of Japan, which documents the cultural rites of an Indigenous group native to Hokkaido and Russia’s far east. We are shown dancing rituals, a drinking ceremony and married women marked by moustache-like facial tattoos. The Ainu were forced to assimilate into Japanese society and this anthropological record is a rare window into their culture.

The films are not showing constantly and when they’re turned off, Takada’s playing is brought to the centre. As she sits behind the piano and jams to prerecorded sounds emanating from the PA, there is a sense she is duetting with ghosts. Throughout the concert, Takada speaks to the audience about “beautiful memories from childhood” like the taste of honey and dates, a coconut tree standing on a desert hilltop or the “sound of red thread being torn”. These brief quizzical phrases contain a quotidian kind of poetry that complements the picturesque visions of Japan from 100 years ago. Like most memories, these images are emotionally vivid but fleeting and prone to distortion.

Ilia Rogatchevski
Originally published by The Wire, December 2023

October 4, 2023
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Mutek

Various venues, Montreal, Canada
Photo: Open Reel Ensemble at MUTEK Forum by Maryse Boyce

This year is the 24th edition of Montreal based festival Mutek, which investigates how new technologies are applied in the creative industries while also exploring tech’s symbiotic relationship with electronic music. It takes place over six days with around 120 artists performing in various venues. At a conference running parallel to the gigs, more than 70 speakers – AI experts, XR (extended reality) professionals, and climate activists – present keynotes, workshops and panel discussions on the theme of Future Currents.

Grand River aka Aimée Portioli opens the festival at New City Gas, a remodelled gasworks that once powered Montreal’s street lights. Her carefully sculpted pulses glow with intensity, threatening to consume everything in their search for a universal rhythm. Premiering material from his latest album No Highs, Tim Hecker is even less forgiving. The set is dominated by avalanche-like frequencies that kidnap the body and inspire Vincent de Belleval to summon atmospheres of burning furnaces and oceanic emergencies in his synchronised light installation.

Performing at Société Des Arts Technologiques (SAT) is Open Reel Ensemble, a trio from Japan who play reel-to-reel recorders. They scratch the reels, bow exposed tape and hit long loops with drumsticks, weaving a rich tapestry of sounds from seemingly unremarkable sources. Call and response sections are recorded live and seamlessly folded back into the groove. In an artist Q&A, band leader Ei Wada explains how he sees these obsolete machines as “exotic folk instruments from the past” that allow the musician to move through time.

More dance-focused sets, albeit ones utilising inventive projections, come courtesy of acts like Efe Ce Ele, Paraadiso and SUFYVN (with visuals by Kaminska). For those with the stamina to keep going all through the night, the ornate MTELUS concert hall hosts the likes of .VRIL and Eris Drew. Ambient performances, meanwhile, are held at Les 7 Doigts. Erin Gee’s ASMR-influenced work Affect Flow is the most memorable of these. Gee hooks up five volunteers to biosensors which control the sound in various ways. The mood oscillates from overwhelming metallic washes to organ-like tones while Gee mediates the seance with her muted monologue and closemiked objects.

The central city square of Esplanade Tranquille is taken over by free performances throughout the week. Toddlers in ear defenders share the dancefloor with seasoned ravers. Out of the expanded programme, Canadian trio Randy’s Calling stands out the most. They encircle themselves with a daisy chain of countless defective ring modulator pedals and generate irresistible waves of feedback laced with a rhythmic electric crackle.

Another highlight is Alessandro Cortini and Marco Ciceri’s concert at the Théâtre Maisonneuve. Ciceri’s hyperreal visuals of undetermined objects resemble AI hallucinations, with the details elusive and constantly shifting. Cortini’s modular set, meanwhile, imitates obliteration by first harmonising mosquitoes with an aircraft engine and ending the piece with tectonic plates grinding against each other.

One of the main draws is the Satosphère, a domed space on the top floor of SAT housing immersive experiences. Projections of cascading viscous liquid – created by BunBun and Alex Vlair – morph into flowerlike apertures opening to reveal the night sky above. When combined with Nadia Struiwigh’s textural techno and the sweat lodge temperature on the dancefloor, these dreamlike images usher everyone in the room into a communal psychedelic experience.

By contrast France Jobin and Markus Heckmann’s Entanglement makes more cerebral use of the same space. This time we’re parked on beanbags, looking up at the ceiling. Geometric structures, inspired by quantum physics, untangle in front of our eyes, as string-infused drones, loaded with static, hang heavily in the air. I view the same piece on a virtual reality headset before the show. It’s one of the more successful XR experiences at Mutek, because it constructs an alternative abstract world rather than trying to supplement or augment our present one.

At the conference, the discourse around AI and XR is generally idolatry, but cracks of critique are also visible. Chris Salter, who co-produced the climate crisis-themed XR play Animate – also staged at the festival – admits to the limitations of what he calls “body extension” and traces XR’s origins to the Vietnam War (when pilots landed their helicopters in the dark using infrared sensors and headsets). Despite the technology’s dominance in the military and computer games, Salter states that artists are the ones who test its limits, citing Marshall McLuhan’s belief in art as an early warning system that monitors changes in society.

Ilia Rogatchevski
Originally published by The Wire, October 2023

August 17, 2023
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Svalbard Soundtracks

Mute Frequencies, my sound art project with Laura Rogatchevskaia, released its Svalbard Soundtracks album today. It’s something we’ve been working on since 2019 and we’re really happy to see that the project found a home on the Flaming Pines label.

Inspired by three silent documentaries about the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, Mute Frequencies have produced an infectious, restless and disturbing journey across time and place in these soundtracks for nostalgic tales of human endeavour, and natural beauty.

From dust speckled black and white footage of seal carcasses, craggy fjords and mining towns to the washed out palette of 1970s Soviet canteens for dusty miners the duo of Ilia Rogatchevski and Laura Rogatchevskaia have crafted a poignant album which aims to explore not just a place, but its representation across particular moments in time.

The three works which comprise the album are named for the silent documentaries they aim to soundtrack: Further North, There Is Only the North Pole (1976, USSR), Spitsbergen (1958, Poland), and A Trip To Svalbard (1930, Norway). As we move back in time over the course of the album from 1976 to 1930 we discover very different versions of Svalbard and its inhabitants, both within each piece, and between them.

There are the triumphant synths of Further North, There Is Only the North Pole with its patriotic Soviet miners of the 1970s. While the nature-focused Spitsbergen (1958) with its spectacular landscapes, curious foxes, auks and intrepid explorers moves rapidly from sparse, metallic tinkling to bursts of drums, plucked bass and shakers within just one short section. The final work which places us amid A Trip To Svalbard from 1930 and its stories of hostile weather, hunting, heroic men and mining detonations builds us a world from percussive strikes, vibrating sheets of metal and stabs of industrial synth tones.

Svalbard Soundtracks is a beguiling album which plays with the conventions of nature documentaries, just as it meditates on the particular resonances of nostalgia.

Listen/download here.
The Quietus review here.

August 14, 2023
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Nkisi

Nkisi, Iklectik, London, UK
Photo: Jonathan Crabb

In the concluding chapter of Kick It: A Social History Of The Drum Kit, author Matt Brennan notes that drums have infiltrated music production to the extent that “we are all drummers now”. This is especially true of electronic music where sampled or synthesized beats form the backbone of virtually every dance, hiphop and pop track. “Rather than drummers being replaceable,” he argues, “the art of the drum kit, drummers, and drumming has now been normalised to the point where it is an indispensable part of contemporary music culture.”

Brennan’s assessment comes to mind when listening to Nkisi’s set at Iklectik, the first concert in the Black Industrial/Noise event series. With her bank of synths, drum machines and CDJs, Nkisi positions complex polyrhythms to the centre of our attention. Deep bass drums interchange between the left and right channels, while chemical washes dominate the higher frequencies. The beginning is slow, almost ambient, but the set quickly builds into a panicked dialogue between malfunctioning appliances, laser pitched toms and floor shattering kicks.

In a conversation with the artist and scholar Hannah Catherine Jones before her set, Nkisi discusses the function of rhythm and ritual in her work. She explains that witnessing the ceremonies at Benin’s Ouidah Vodun Festival showed her how music can affect the environment by welcoming spiritual energies into the performance space. In addition, she notes that the construction of cross rhythms – conflicting patterns played simultaneously – are instrumental to her practice, particularly in a live setting.

Nkisi’s fluctuating dynamics between the different rhythmic layers encourage the audience to actively participate. The heaving groove and unexpected accents shift all the bodies in the room to dance, even those who initially parked themselves on the floor. With the temple-like interior bathed in ultramarine light, and infectious beats pulsating from all sides, it’s impossible not to surrender your mind and body.

Jones likens this idea to Sylvia Wynter’s concept of consciousness reversal, which states that drums, and the multitude of grooves expressed through them, bind the self to the collective social experience of dancing and listening. Nkisi also sees her music as a conduit for spiritual technologies that runs counter to the demonisation of voodoo by Hollywood, and helps to keep ancient energies alive by bringing them into a contemporary art-music context.

In the Kongo culture, nkisi are sculptural objects inhabited by spirits. These days, Nkisi says, they are often “imprisoned in museums”, permanently exposed to the public, divorced from their intended ritualistic function. It’s easy to draw a parallel between the spiritual activation of such objects and the fetishisation of gear in electronic music. For Nkisi, however, sonic practice is a sincere form of channelling that allows outside forces to take over. “Noise is connected to the non-representation of nature – ancestors,” she says. “The spirit loves to communicate through electricity.” Her music is also connected to decolonial practices and asks “how to take care of the invisible forces without trying to expose them or continuing the violence” directed towards the occult.

During their talk, Jones muses on the idea that “repetition makes us learn something”. Through repetition, mediated by electricity, Nkisi initiates the audience into ancestral musical practices, teaching us the power that rhythm has over the collective experience and ensures that ancient rituals continue to exist in the present.

Ilia Rogatchevski
Originally published by The Wire, August 2023.

July 30, 2023
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Suzanne Ciani

Suzanne Ciani + Li Yilei
Kings Place, London, UK

Taking refuge in Kings Place from the sweltering summer heat, I’m met by Li Yilei’s solitary song. The London based artist begins with an avian melody performed on a whistle. The phrase fills the hall, looping and creasing, inviting other sounds to follow. Electric rushes bring to mind soft fabric blowing in the breeze of an open window and the dancing tree leaves beyond. Li takes to her Moog Claravox to duet with the bird calls. The theremin is somewhat harsh at first, but Li later fades in gentle drones and sounds of rain.

Perhaps it’s the disconcerting weather coupled with the incessant hype around AI in the media, but the discordant frequencies emanating from Li’s theremin and the way they swell into broken and distorted voices evokes a sense of loss for me. Li is influenced by Eastern ideologies of emptiness and their music laments the fading resilience of nature. Soon our planet will be nothing more than plastic trash and scorched earth. We’ll be gone, but the lauded AI we are so desperate to perfect will remain, reminding our lifeless desert that it was once thriving and beautiful with a litany of simulated rainforest sounds.

The start of Suzanne Ciani’s performance echoes the closing minutes of Li’s set with crashing waves and electric birdsong that rise out of the silence to challenge my pessimism. Her workstation consists of the Buchla 200e, a few touch screens and a bird-like tactile controller. The composer’s movements are captured by a live visual feed. The projection shows her intimate interaction with the modular synth, going some way to deconstruct the instrument’s monolithic impassibility.

Suddenly, bubbling acid bass and metallic textures catapult us into the cosmos. The tempo increases. It’s pulsating, almost industrial, begging you to move without ever really breaking out into dance beats. There is a moment when the camera loses focus and only the synth’s blinking LEDs remain visible. The impression is that of a ship sighting the lights of a coastal city at night, in dense fog. You’re not sure whether to feel relief or trepidation, because you’re still many miles from shore.

Despite its illuminating projection, Ciani’s quadraphonic set is better experienced with your eyes closed. Subaquatic sounds and crashing waves cascade around the the cavernous concert hall, as if striving to flood it. At one point the sequenced beeps are filtered and transformed into humanoid voices that recall the sampled throat singing in Shpongle’s psytrance epic “Divine Moments Of Truth”. In light of Ciani’s former flirtation with new age, this performance is psychedelic but in a way that doesn’t rely on kitsch or cliche. Instead the composer foregrounds technology to make the listener look inward.

At the end of the show, Ciani invites the audience onstage to say hello to her Buchla. She also expresses admiration for the quadraphonic format, explaining that “electronic sound is meant to move”. The Buchla was designed with this in mind and therefore creates “valid content for the medium”. Ciani’s remarkable career as a commercial composer, concert pianist and electronic music pioneer are documented in the 2017 film A Life In Waves. In it, she talks about being drawn to nature’s spiritual influence and the romanticism of life itself. Perhaps, if we appreciated what Ciani calls the “theatre of the ocean”, with the same conviction that she does, our future wouldn’t be so bleak after all.

Ilia Rogatchevski
Originally published by The Wire, July 2023

July 17, 2023
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Museum Of Portable Sound

Museum Of Portable Sound
Portsmouth, UK/Online

“Are you familiar with the story of the first MP3?” asks John Kannenberg, director and chief curator of the Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS). He plays me the 1987 a cappella version of Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner”. Karlheinz Brandenburg, the mathematician who co-developed the MP3, believed this song to be the purest recording of the human voice and a perfect test case for his compression algorithm. Kannenberg suspects, however, that it was just a pretext for meeting the singer and “evidence of tech bros being icky”. Vega disliked her canonisation as “The Mother of the MP3”, and later recorded “Tom’s Diner” onto a wax cylinder at the Thomas Edison laboratory in New Jersey in a bid to wrestle her song back from the digital world.

The MP3 origin story is one of many that Kannenberg employs to contextualise his collection of sounds, which currently stands at 325 items spread over 30 galleries. The project originated in Kannenberg’s museology background and field recording work, which evolved into a PhD thesis arguing “for the collection, preservation, and exhibition of sounds as objects within museum practice”. MOPS is unlike other museums in that it’s not a physical space, but consists of audio files stored on the curator’s old iPhone 4S. Visiting the museum can be done via Zoom or in person, if you’re able to travel to Portsmouth where Kannenberg is currently based.

We meet at the Aspex gallery cafe on a quiet Sunday afternoon. Engaging in cloakroom cosplay, Kannenberg offers to check in my bags before handing me a gallery guide. The table is laid out with portable sound objects, white archival gloves, museum map and iPhone. The visit begins with a discussion of the objects: a spool of recording wire, an official Hello Kitty MiniDisc, and a Tweety Bird-shaped MP3 player among other things. This is only a small sample of Kannenberg’s extensive collection of physical media. The sound files are organised into colour coded playlists and follow a taxonomy that mirrors the curatorial categories you may find in an ordinary museum.

“Tom’s Diner”, for example, is listed in the History of Audio Recording gallery, alongside “The First Recording Of A Human Voice”, produced in 1860 by the French inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. The first exhibit in the Archaeology gallery is a 1939 BBC broadcast of King Tutankhamun’s trumpets being played for the first time in 3000 years. Remarkably, the originals were used and one trumpet accidentally shattered. For visitors overwhelmed by the volume of sounds on offer, Kannenberg creates guided tours encompassing themed highlights and “city tours” of field recordings.

Kannenberg explains that creating MOPS was the first time he felt “honest as an artist”, combining his own practice and specialism in museology with humour. The roleplay aspect and meticulously designed gallery guide highlight the strange rituals associated with museums. MOPS also challenges established histories of sound. Citing the development of mechanical telephones, Kannenberg notes that the discovery of sound travelling down string has been traditionally attributed to Robert Hooke, but the phenomenon was known independently to various cultures centuries prior to the British physicist’s experiments. While MOPS has its detractors – David Toop once called it a “flea circus” – the project interrogates what museums are with an inventive curatorial approach and presents its artefacts with a sense of fun often absent in sound art.

Ilia Rogatchevski
Originally published by The Wire, July 2023

July 14, 2023
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Deep Listening w/ Blanc Sceol

In my latest podcast for audio.com I talked to Blanc Sceol, the London based sound art duo of Stephen Shiell and Hannah White.

Stephen and Hannah work together across disciplines, incorporating field recording, intervention, voice, acoustic ecology and instrument building. They often focus on participatory action and deep listening practices.

Their compositions and performances are anchored in their surroundings and respond to the landscape. We discuss their sound practice, instrument making and ecology work.

Video and lead photo by Hannah Lovell.
July 10, 2023
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Unofficial Channels: Radio Amnion

If you tune your digital dial to Radio Amnion each month during the full moon, you’ll hear a new composition specifically commissioned for the occasion. In June, Blanc Sceol, the London based duo of Stephen Shiell and Hannah White, presented Orbit, a half-hour piece recorded at an East London pumping station. The meditative track is composed on an eponymous decagonal string instrument of Blanc Sceol’s own making. The Orbit is played by two people: one rotating the cedar barrel, the other bowing its strings. Its cascading, hallucinatory frequencies are interwoven with one word poems created by participants of Blanc Sceol’s sonic meditation sessions.

Jol Thoms, the artist and researcher behind Radio Amnion, met the duo during one of these meditations. Thoms associates the moon with the “divine feminine”, standing in opposition to “our wildly patriarchal societies”. The satellite’s influence on the tides is another reason why the project activates during the apex of the moon cycle. Radio Amnion is part of the P-ONE neutrino telescope: developed at the Technical University of Munich and submerged 2.5 kilometres into the Pacific Ocean’s Cascadia Basin, it’s designed to detect particle interactions within the water. The addition of the Sonic

Platform – a tetrahedral speaker to channel the station’s subaquatic transmissions – serves a more conceptual purpose. “Radio Amnion opens the possibility for us to think with both science and mysticism simultaneously,” Thoms explains. “I’m obsessed with the ecological problems we’re facing and interested in renewing our relationships with the Earth.” Thoms is inspired by the sentient ocean planet in Stanisław Lem’s Solaris, alongside the spiritual traditions of indigenous communities. Broadcasting soundworks into the ocean, he suggests, creates a positive dialogue with the planet that doesn’t exploit its resources or destroy its biodiversity.

Blanc Sceol’s Orbit, also released by Otoroku, was the 25th transmission in the station’s two year history. Previous commissions include Margarida Mendes’s Lateral Waters, and Libita Sibungu and Perivi Katjavivi’s inaugural liquid-themed poem pacific2.wav. A highlight is Nocturne: Sonic Migrations in which Matt Warren, Sally Ann McIntyre, Dani Kirby and Eliza Burke blend together bioacoustic data, environmental sound and interviews with nipaluna/Hobart residents to tell the story of the near-extinct whale populations of Tasmania’s Derwent River. But you don’t have to dive deep to catch the next broadcast – their webpage will host the simultaneous stream. ○ radioamnion.net

Ilia Rogatchevski
Originally published by The Wire, July 2023

June 6, 2023
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O YAMA O: The Art of Falling Apart

O YAMA O The quartet formed from the eclectic cultural milieu around London’s Cafe Oto take folk, sound art and call and response to create a liberated vision of modern song. By Ilia Rogatchevski Photography by Wendy Huynh.

Sitting outside East London’s Cafe Oto, O YAMA O vocalist and Oto co-founder Keiko Yamamoto reflects on her entry into the capital’s experimental music scene. “I was working at the Bonnington Cafe in Vauxhall,” she says of the South London community space. “Upstairs, every Monday, an improvisation group gathered. That’s when I met Adam Bohman, Steve Beresford and David Ryan. Steve Beresford came down to buy some food from me, then went upstairs. That was my first encounter.”

Cafe Oto, which was marking its 15th birthday on the night of our interview, has become synonymous in the UK and beyond with music that challenges boundaries. Initially, Yamamoto’s intention was to expand her artistic network, after making a permanent move to the UK from Japan. “Me, Hamish [Dunbar, her partner and Oto co-founder] and another friend started hosting a show, twice or three times a month, in pub function rooms. That was out of wanting to connect, because we were doing various jobs, random things. In those days we didn’t have any social networks.”

The itinerant project, which was then called Divers or Loons (after the migratory loon bird), settled into its present cafe incarnation in Dalston in 2008, but continued to serve as a platform for collaboration. O YAMA O came together after Yamamoto saw sculptor Rie Nakajima, an acquaintance from the Chelsea College of Arts, perform at the venue. “Rie and I knew each other through a mutual friend,” Yamamoto recalls. “I knew she made sculptures. Japan had a horrible tsunami disaster [after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake]. We organised a commemoration and I invited her to perform. That was the first time I saw her activate her objects.”

Nakajima utilises everyday items and found paraphernalia – ceramic bowls, tin boxes, plastic whistles, foil sheets – triggering their sound potential with small motors or by aeolian means, often in site specific contexts.

At the time of the tsunami concert, running Cafe Oto was demanding and left little time for Yamamoto to be creative. “I wasn’t really making anything, apart from singing to my children. It was immediate and something I could do every day without committing any time. I wanted to make it into some sort of shape and share it with somebody outside of the house. Then I saw Rie’s sculpture: a sound made with a rice bowl. It resonated with me.”

O YAMA O’s improvised performances combined Yamamoto’s singing – touching on subjects derived from Japanese folklore and domestic life – with Nakajima’s kinetic objects. Their first concerts took place in intimate settings, such London’s No Show Space in 2014. In a video of the performance, the audience encircle O YAMA O’s modest set-up in the small gallery space. The duo starts quietly, with Nakajima spinning a corrugaphone over her head. The whirling tube emits a faint and eerie drone, which acts as a counterpoint to Yamamoto’s voice. Before long, Nakajima summons delicate textures out of her objects, slowly mutating the music into what appears to be a choreographed crescendo, but is actually a largely improvised ritual. O YAMA O’s current line-up is completed by violinist Billy Steiger and drummer Marie Roux, who also have deep connections to Oto: Steiger is one of its sound engineers, while Roux photographed gigs for the venue’s archive. Roux and Steiger have contributed to the group from the beginning, but conflicting schedules meant they couldn’t always perform as an ensemble. The visual arts practice of the members informs or crosses over with O YAMA O: Steiger has made abstract paintings during their gigs, while Roux’s photograph of an oblique Tunisian street scene adorns the front cover of the group’s new album Galo.

I meet all four members at a Central London community garden to hear more about their collaboration. Nakajima has recently returned from Milly-la-Forêt in France, where she performed alongside Pierre Berthet on the site of Jean Tinguely’s sculpture Le Cyclop. “I don’t care much for what is art or music,” she declares. “It’s just a situation. If I’m in a musical context – a concert or festival – I gather information from my past and try to make something more interesting than before, but that’s the only thing I think about.” Nakajima sees her work in terms of accumulated knowledge that is collected over time, like raindrops in a bowl, with improvisation being an opportunity for this knowledge to express itself.

One notable addition to the group is former Flying Lizard, David Cunningham. Although he has occasionally performed with O YAMA O in a live setting, it’s his signature production work that helps to shape the band’s recorded material. “The fifth Beatle”, as Steiger calls him, is both inside and outside the project, sympathetic to the band’s intentions, but not afraid to critique their aesthetic decisions. Nakajima elaborates: “[Galo] is definitely his personality. His identity is there in the album. When we play live, it’s our collective. It’s all mixed up.”

The band see Cunningham’s role as solving a jigsaw puzzle of disparate pieces, combining old concert recordings with time-delayed Zoom sessions and outdoor sounds into a cohesive whole. “It’s good to have him,” Yamamoto agrees. “He cares a lot. Otherwise we are a bit too wobbly, edgeless blobs.”

Galo, a follow-up to O YAMA O’s self-titled 2018 debut album, was recorded over the course of several years, with sessions beginning in 2019 and continuing remotely throughout the pandemic. In the first half of 2020, Cafe Oto was required to close, and pieces like the instrumental “Harvest Dance” were recorded at an empty venue with Nakajima and Steiger taking turns at the house piano. “I See You” and “Jigoku” were also recorded live, and alongside “Harvest Dance” give the impression of a composed triptych of songs. But the band maintain that the opposite is true: all aspects were improvised. “There’s nothing set,” declares Yamamoto. “It’s really more exciting to make it up on the spot. Everybody has their own tools and goes into the zone, really giving each other space. For me it’s like dancing.”

Choreography happens to be an important constant in O YAMA O’s work. In late 2021, Nakajima and Yamamoto presented a performance-talk at London’s Somerset House, as part of The Wire’s Music By Any Means series. In an online article promoting the event, the band listed influences that included dancer Min Tanaka, the performance poetry of Gōzō Yoshimasu, and the traditional menburyu dance, which is native to the Saga Prefecture and staged annually to welcome in the harvest.

The Somerset House event, which also featured frequent collaborator David Toop, was titled Accidental Rituals. With accidents being unplanned or left to chance, and rituals implying tradition, premeditation and repetition, does the notion of an accidental ritual not seem like a contradiction? The key, Nakajima insists, is “just not to think”. Yamamoto elaborates: “The live [performance] is unplanned. It’s improvisation, but each individual has a method within: things that nobody can change. For me, it’s important. [Ritual] doesn’t have to be special. Something special is always happening in everyday life. Everyone does beautiful things without knowing. I want to depict that.” Themes of everyday beauty run throughout Galo. The album’s opening track “Kuroneko” bursts forth with whistles, melodica and a crashing drum that serve to illustrate Yamamoto’s lyrics about a black cat running on the grass at night, bathed in moonlight. Elsewhere there is “Hakushon” – the title is the Japanese onomatopoeic equivalent to the standard sneeze response “achoo!” – and “Suna No Shiro”, which takes the fragility of sand castles as its central theme. “I See You” and “Jigoku” both explore paranoia through characters who are looking back at someone who is observing them. While the latter track once again references sand castles, implying that trust is just as easily broken as those impermanent structures,

the former song goes back to a postcard that Yamamoto saw in childhood. Her mother, also an artist, wrote the words “I See You Seeing Me” on the back of an exhibition invitation, the sentence spiralling round to make a complete circle. Intentionally or otherwise, this concrete poem is reminiscent of Fluxus event scores by the likes of George Brecht and Yoko Ono, where the thought experiment evoked by the words was in itself an activation of the artwork. Ono’s Sun Piece (1962), for example, instructs the reader to “watch the sun until it becomes square”, mirroring the circularity and magical thinking of “I See You”.

Another thread running through O YAMA O songs is folklore. Yōkai, the supernatural apparitions deeply embedded in Japanese mythology, appear in the track titles of the band’s debut album. “Oni” references the iconic red-skinned demons who punish the damned in hell, while “Kitsune” is a nod to shape-shifting fox spirits. The word yama translates into mountain from Japanese, and the ensemble’s name is a stylistic visualisation of a mountain flanked by two circles, perhaps suggesting the figures of Nakajima and Yamamoto standing on either side of their sound-making objects.

The band hint at a soft spot for folk, listing songs by Pentangle and Fairport Convention as influential. “Jacky My Son”, an a cappella arrangement by Staverton Bridge of a traditional song, informs O YAMA O’s use of the voice to deliver an emotional impact, such as can be heard in the sorrowful “Suna No Shiro”. By contrast, songs like “Kuroneko” or “Oni” embody elements of childlike joy via their use of recorders, harmonicas, whistles and other small instruments. Such kinship with innocence brings to mind the playful music to which the tanuki in Pom Poko, Isao Takahata’s 1994 Studio Ghibli feature, revel and party to.

The foundations of the ensemble’s music, however, are found objects. Improvisors like Steve Beresford and Adam Bohman are well known for awakening the textures inherent within everyday objects. However, unlike Beresford’s kitsch toys or Bohman’s bricolage, which often incorporates industrial objects like springs and metal sheets, O YAMA O usually opt for small domestic items that you may find accumulating in the kitchen cupboard and can never bring yourself to throw away. “Adam Bohman was my gateway into improvised music,” says Steiger. “That was the first point when [I understood] you can do whatever you want! His influence on music is completely under recognised. So much stems from him.” Yamamoto agrees: “It’s beyond music. It’s just him and a medium”.

I mention Dan Barrow’s review of Nakajima’s 2018 solo show at Birmingham’s Ikon Gallery in The Wire 414 where he assesses her work in relation to the “split in histories of free improvisation between ‘small instrument’ music, based on short and quick-decaying instrumental gestures, and drones”. Bearing in mind their use of sustain, as with Steiger’s violin for example, to what extent do these tensions between decay, dynamics and acoustic dominance manifest in O YAMA O? “It seems quite an arbitrary split to me,” Steiger replies. “The violin doesn’t sit on either side. We make short sounds and long sounds.” Yamamoto responds with a question of her own: “Does it translate into an emotional sound if it’s prolonged or repetitive? We don’t really think that way.” Live, the ensemble sometimes ignore their own setlists and traverse paths unknown. Bruxelles documents their 2019 concert at Les Ateliers Claus in Belgium. The first half of the album is a demonstration of spontaneous composition, small sounds of clinking bottles and woodblocks engaging in dialogue with Steiger’s pizzicato violin, while a distant melodica draws out melodies from the air. Roux’s drums start gently, echoing the clatter of spinning plates, before evolving into a tribal march that guides Yamamoto’s voice into the key refrain on “Namekuji”.

With this blank canvas approach to performance, do they see their work as denoting a kind of freedom? “Sometimes improvisors, they just play,” says Roux. “We do lots of call and response. I can feel a lot of exchange – it builds up into something. I always felt we have this connection or structure that gives me space and I can experiment within that space.” Steiger follows the thought: “Freedom is there in the way we play. I can be free to make whatever noise I want, but there’s a responsibility to actually make it right. What’s the right sound to put in this situation?”

Steiger retells a story where he made use of a turntable the DJ forgot to turn off during O YAMA O’s concert in Belgium. “At some point I went over and I was moving the record super slowly. There was this giant sub-bass. It was loud. In that sense, this idea of total improvisation – where you’re allowed to do whatever – doesn’t change no matter who I’m playing with or what the context is. It’s actually something that I think about a lot.”

For Nakajima, freedom exists in relation to restriction. “Freedom, for me, [comes] after understanding my limit: what I cannot do. First, I [need to] understand the physicalities of the situation. If I know that then I can think about it or just free up some space.” Have their performances ever fallen apart or dissolved into disaster? “There’s nothing to fall apart,” Steiger assures me. “Or it falls apart all the time,” Roux jokes. “I think we try to make it easy when we play live because we trust each other. It allows us to feel quite comfortable – loose.” Each member of the ensemble has their own extensive individual practice outside of O YAMA O. Nakajima exhibits her installations across the world and performs solo, or in group formulations with other artists. From 2013–16 she curated the Sculpture performance series along with David Toop, which sought to undermine the notion of performance as entertainment and argued that durational events could be classed as a form of sculpture. Dead Plants & Living Objects, her duo with the Belgian sound artist Pierre Berthet, extends her vocabulary of motorised objects to incorporate automated plants, suspended cans and industrial materials. For this summer’s Monheim Triennale, held in the German town of Monheim am Rhein, Nakajima will present collaborative installations with the Düsseldorf based artist Miki Yui, composer Hans W Koch and Berthet, taking inspiration from locations where the Rhine meets the river bank.

Yamamoto is currently based in Devon, where she ran the artist-run project space Aller Aller with Josie Cockram and Hamish Dunbar on the Dartington Trust estate until the Covid pandemic and logistical issues mothballed the project. In June 2022, Yamamoto performed as a solo musician for the first time, opening a Conrad Schnitzler exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf. The piece consisted of taped field recordings played back on two cassette machines: crying cows, squelched puddles, a crazy storm. “It was very simple, really analogue,” Yamamoto says of the event. “I had to [press play], reverse, do it [gestures pressing play again], and I was shouting sometimes. I had a drum and little things as well. I wanted to make noise.”

Steiger’s second solo album Loud Object, released on Cafe Oto’s Otoroku imprint in 2022, also embraces noise. Each side of the LP is dedicated to a 20 minute violin improvisation where the bow grinds steadily across the strings until electronic processing inverts the organic sounds and releases the tension. The album takes its name from a rejected title for Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva, a novel devoid of characters or plot. The reference suggests an automatic approach to composition where Steiger makes creative choices based on experience, but without an end goal.

Roux’s approach to photography is comparable. “I also can’t plan, because if I do it’s a catastrophe,” she says when discussing her visual work. “I’ll have an idea to go somewhere and just take pictures, trying to show some order that’s not mine. It’s analogue, so I don’t know how it’s going to come out. It’s sort of the same when drumming.” Despite being taught by a heavy metal drummer, Roux’s minimal style seeks out different textures, responding to the other sounds in the room. Roux also edited the video for “Galo” (which is viewable on The Wire website). Composed from private photographs and mobile phone footage taken in transit, the visuals reflect the speed and pressure embodied in the album’s closing track. And while Yamamoto’s words are intended to be “as meaningless as possible”, the song’s title sounds like gallop when pronounced with Roux’s French accent, proposing that O YAMA O are on a rapid forward trajectory into the unknown.

O YAMA O’s Galo is released by Bison

Ilia Rogatchevski
Originally published by The Wire, June 2023.