24–25 April 2017
Delighted to host a very rare two-day residency from the FEN quartet of Otomo Yoshihide, Ryu Hankil and Yuen Chee Wai – their first OTO shows together since 2010!
FEN (Far East Network) is an improvised music project group made up of musicians from different parts of Asia. The quartet comprises Otomo Yoshihide (Japan), Ryu Hankil (Korea), Yan Jun (China) and Yuen Chee Wai (Singapore). FEN was started by globally renowned musician Otomo Yoshihide and it made its debut 2008 at MIMI Festival in Marseilles, France. Following its debut, FEN has performed extensively throughout Europe and all across Asia.
Each member is an artist who works individually in experimental music scene in his respective country. Each has been supporting each other's activities by organising concerts in his own country, and this relationship became the motivation to form FEN.
FEN pursues 'performing together by improvisation' as a method and 'music without ends' as an outcome. While FEN is a improvisational music group it is at the same time an idea or concept which hopes to maintain unique aesthetics and sustainable relationships in diverse Asian cultures. FEN's activities explore aesthetic possibilities in new forms of music which are different from the Western world. FEN's goals are to become a foundation and to organise diverse meetings to support other sustainable networks and cultural exchanges among many other experimental musicians and artists in and throughout Asia. FEN further hopes to work with musicians and artists of other disciplines (traditional and contemporary) from all across Asia.
Otomo Yoshihide moves between free jazz, noise, improvisation, composition and the unclassifiable with a generosity that opens up the possibilities for expression in all of the constellations with which he's involved. He spent his teenage years in Fukushima, about 300 kilometers north of Tokyo. Influenced by his father, an engineer, Otomo began making electrical devices such as a radio and an electronic oscillator. In junior high school, his hobby was making sound collages using open-reel tape recorders. This was his first experience creating music. Soon after entering high school he formed a band which played rock and jazz, with Otomo on guitar. It wasn't long, however, before he became a free jazz aficionado, listening to artists like Ornette Coleman, Erick Dolphy and Derek Bailey; and hearing music, both on disk and at concerts, by Japanese free jazz artists. Especially influenced by alto sax player Kaoru Abe and guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi, Otomo decided to play free jazz.
In 1990, Otomo started what was to become Ground Zero. Until it disbanded in March 1998, the band was at the core of his musical creativity, while it underwent several changes in style and membership. Since Ground Zero, Otomo has embraced minimal improvisation, film music and the jazz/big band conceptions of his New Jazz Quartet/Quintet/Orchestra.
Ryu Hankil is a computer musician, improviser, and writer based in Seoul.
Ryu Hankil has long explored the possibility of generating another kind of music through non-musical objects. His questions and practice regarding how an object's inherent vibrations can constitute a musical context led him to realize that the speculative power of sonic thinking creates fiction in diverse ways.
To put this understanding into practice, he actively utilizes the feedback between physical modeling synthesis and sonic thinking writing.
He has now shifted his primary focus from non-musical objects to the speculative power of sonic thinking, exploring how sonic thinking can generate different music, function as a new cognitive system, and fundamentally and comprehensively reconfigure today's reality.
yan jun, a musician and poet based in beijing.
he works on experimental music and improvised music. he uses noise, field recording, body and concept as materials.
sometimes he goes to audience’s home for playing a plastic bag.
“i wish i was a piece of field recording.”
yanjun.org
For this event, Yuko will read this poem by her mum, Kazuko Shiraishi, called ‘ bus stop'. This is the English translation of it:
BUS STOP
On top of the shifting sand a
Shadow is seeping in like a dot
It is a bus stop
No sign telling from where to where
There is no one
To answer all the questions
Like purpose and what then or
Why
Even what is called meaning
Has worn out and. in the old dictionary
Now gritty and sticking out a stone tongue just laughs
(Even the little room inside the brain
The wind has flown off somewhere
So . . .)
Saying so
I go out get on my bike but even though I get on
I don't have a destination but to go back
Inside, too
That place also is a destination that doesn't exist
Maybe the bus stop. has come to the door
And might be building a fire
Maybe the bus stop with a huge ancient eye
Like an iguana might be watching. passengers
There might be an angel lying face down like a puppy
Pretending to be asleep
There is Sister Maria who became
A green birthmark simply because she was afraid of committing adultery
Also sweat-soaked deserters
In dirty combat boots who can't even become devils. or. lazy angels
The bus stop may be watching them
Smudging. in the color of sand
Around the eyes with the shifting sand
Something that is a dot
On the shifting sand!
Certainly existing that
Phantom existence!
_______
from ‘Let Those Who Appear’, Kazuko Shiraishi
New Directions Publishing
Translated by Samuel Grolmes & Yumiko Tsumura
Yuen Chee Wai is a musician and artist working primarily with sound. He is known for his improvised sound and noise explorations as well as his drone / ambient / field recording approaches to music making, and using a myriad of electronic instruments. Chee Wai’s strong interest in Philosophy, Literature, Film and Cultural Studies often finds him incorporating textual ideas and concepts in his sound work, with themes like memory, loss and invisibility as main thought trajectories. In 2008, together with Otomo Yoshihide (Japan), Ryu Hankil (Korea) and Yan Jun (China), they formed FEN - Far East Network, and made their debut at the Mimi Festival in Marseilles. FEN has subsequently presented in many countries and festival around Europe and Asia. FEN is an experimental and improvised music quartet that aims to work predominantly with musicians and artists from all disciplines across Asia. Chee Wai also plays synth and electronics in the avant / experimental rock band, The Observatory (Singapore). He has performed and exhibited extensively locally and internationally. He has also designed and composed sound for installation, dance, film and TV / radio.
