Kaiko 邂逅

Recordings

邂逅 (Kaikō) is the first collaboration between Japanese sound designer Haruo Okada (岡田晴夫) and Italian sound artist Fabio Perletta.

During the magnificent backdrop of Japanese Hanami in spring 2015, when paper lanterns were hung for the purpose of Yozakura and Sakura flowers’ blooming reached their peak, they performed an improvised liveset at the warm and ancient-looking Kissa Sakaiki in Tokyo/Shinjuku on March 31, as part of Perletta’s Japan tour. They performed without any pre-arranged structures, just following their instinct, and later they decided to re-create a composition based on the same material and added new compositional elements in order to make the piece more detailed and balanced.

邂逅 (Kaikō), meaning chance meeting, refers to the unexpected success of their performance, and is presented in a single movement of synthetic and real sounds that continuously merge and overlap, creating an ongoing dialogue between raw and processed, digital and analogue, real and artificial spaces, living and non-living things.

邂逅 (Kaikō) features some of Haruo Okada’s field recordings collected for his Sound Lab project that he has been running at Pioneer, including the ambient sound of a limestone cave, a walk through a forest, insects, noises surrounding a pier, a bonfire and a Suikinkutsu, a traditional Japanese garden ornament and music device.

Recording Locations (collected by Haruo Okada)
Cave: Bantimurung Bulusaraung National Park in Indonesia
Walk + Bonfire: Afan Forest in the Shinanomachi (Nagano Prefecture, Japan)
Insects: Shirakami Sanchi Mountain (Tohoku Region, Japan)
Pier: Iojima Island (Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan)
Suikinkutsu: Aobayama Park (Sendai, Japan)

Photography by Fabio Perletta.

A special thanks to Celer/Will Thomas Long, Yuki Aida, Tomotsugu Nakamura, Kissa Sakaiki.

Listening interrupts or invites, this time is both, beautifuly presented as both emergence and attraction, as a set of improvisational moments and temporary guidelines; a constant, surprising and unpredictable resonance weaving from a paradox: planned and random, apparently calculated but ultimately subject to the unforeseen.邂逅 is a room for surprise, for sounds that appear to be but are not, for sometimes vast and shimmering spaces, yet at times as small as a droplet. A mass of micro-macro events fed from a logic that goes beyond logic, using a language that goes beyond language: intuition of empty places that are not empty, sounds that are not sounds. Among a changing tissue of field recordings and an inevitable shelter of tonalities, these two artists lead the listener to a journey that despite of telling a story, ultimately loses any concrete narrative to go to the wonders of the unnameable, where listening is free in its ubiquity.

Miguel Isaza, Infinite Grain