Taku Unami, solo — Amplify 2011, Stones
Photo by Yuko Zama: Taku Unami, performing at the Stone, Amplify 2011, Stones.
It’s been an interesting past couple years in EAI. If you follow the I Hate Music message board, innumerable discussions have taken place about the future of this area of music. The continued antics of Mattin, and Diego Chamy, have certainly been sketchy, often misplaced pointers toward some fundamental questions about what exactly it is we are doing here. Perhaps there is a feeling we have asked all the necessary questions about the music, and now we must question the situation in which it takes place, and the perceived hierarchies, within.
In a way this has been going on for a long time, or maybe it’s always going on, but certain statements seem to move the whole thing along, light-years beyond the rest of the conversation. Enter Motubachi. Probably the most successful representation to date, of a work that goes beyond the flat stream of sound within location. It disorients the listener with a blurring of lines between recording, performance, theater, and composition, and leaves one to only guess at what actually has taken place.
This was the first document of a new approach for Taku. One that (whether it’s his intent, or not) seems to address a lot of these concerns, but far from the heavy handed stance-taking of some of his contemporaries, it does so with Taku’s singular sense of timing, and impish wit.
This new approach was taken a step further in last night’s set. Without the presence of a grounding improvisational force, such as Krebs, Taku was left to assemble (in some ways literally) his own field of experience, and transform the Stone into an activated space that included both the building, and the audience.
The set began out of nowhere. Everyone knew by this point that he was going to be doing the “box thing”, but it was unclear, exactly how this would go down, how much setup was needed, etc. So with the house lights up, and the crowd still murmuring, he began, like a sculptor in his own workshop to build up the space. He’d place a box, look around, fumble in a bag, adjust furniture placement, tie pieces together with twine, stand measuring tapes on the floor, and even banter a bit with the audience (gesturing to the oscillating fan… “Too much wind?”). It was initially unclear if this was a start or setup, though I think everyone knew that this was it deep down, and so with the air slowly being sucked out of the room, a quietude took over, both domestic, and ritualistic.
Taku seemed to be up for digging himself into a hole, and then letting the dirt fall in on him over and over, taking us all deeper into what we didn’t know, one precarious cardboard construction after another. He would build, and build, and it would shift ominously, or shake, and near topple, as he stomped around. At one point he leaned a tall box construction against an already precarious oscillating fan, atop two chairs. Surely a recipe for disaster, when one looked around at how it was all tied to objects throughout the room in twine and tape. And so it shifted and shuffled about, slipping slowly minute by minute until it all fell to the floor in a thunderous crash, leaving only, the strangely Unami-esque slow rhythmic ticking of the oscillating fan, still dead set on doing it’s work. This was one of several toppling crescendoes, punctuated here and there by less thunderous failures, a knocked over tape measure, or a lone collapsing box.
All the while Taku proceeded as if he was legitimately not trying to cause a ruckus. Each blunder was met with him rushing to try and catch something, or cringing as some piece of debris fell near an audience member.
After several failed attempts, at last he had his construction, it was all standing. The fan was shifting clip light shine against a framework of boxes, casting shadows of twine and tape measures. Finally, he turned down the house lights, and we all stared at what he’d built. It was beautiful shape, light, and sound play, all on it’s own. Taku even seemed to be arrested by it as he stood taking it in for what seemed minutes on end. And then it was time for the climax. Earlier he had handed myself and another audience member the ends of a string, and he instructed us at the count down of three, to pull the strings as hard as possible. So we did, and brought the whole thing down in a series of crashes to the floor, the only remaining sound the fan again, grinding away for dear life, the lights, splayed out, casting fragments of illumination from the pile. But then another sound became apparent, Taku, in the back of the room, in the dark, tapping out a rhythm on a pair of differently tuned calves, in contrast to the steady beat of the fan. This sudden conscious aesthetic move, seemed to wrap the whole of what went before in it’s simple musicality. We hung there, enjoying that moment for a minute or so, and then the lights were brought back up, and without a word Taku began to pick up, a bit. After a bit of confusion, hushed questions, and looking about from the audience, he ended the set with the word, gracias. Perfect.
The whole play was a delight. It was humorous, but not cloying. It was artful, but not pretentious. It was unmusical, and it was wondrous music all the same. It seemed to cast a spell the way the best performances do, and yet, everyone seemed easy with themselves, comfortable. You could laugh out loud at will, or shift in your seat without care. We were all in a way, a part of the performance. Not forced, not antagonized, or scrutinized, but invited, into an intimate space where something both pleasurable and challenging to the senses was happening. All of the concerns, and arguments about where and what we are, and why we go on, all seemed to be given an answer in a way, but not in some overbearing sermon, but like a friend, inviting us to play.
