RIE NAKAJIMA & SEYMOUR WRIGHT

Tonight Rie Nakajima and Seymour Wright will play a duo together for the first time.

This collaboration has emerged out of mutual, but very different, connections with the work of Berlin artist Rolf Julius (1939-2011).

As Seymour finished a Glasgow 2009 solo performance at the Instal festvial (and with it ended a certain way of playing (that he will re-visit tonight)):

http://seymourwright.bandcamp.com/track/march-2009-glasgow

Rolf Julius had already begun a solo in the adjacent arch into which the audience (and Seymour) moved. A meeting the following day led to the idea of future collaborations, but nothing ever happened.

Rie met Julius at the group exhibition Zen und Konkret at Quilow in Germany the same year. Since then he has been an important artist for her. She remembers Julius letting her use one of his speaker cones for her installation, from which point it seemed that their soft collaboration started.

In 2011 she organised the Lost Sounds events, at Cafe OTO and SoundFjord, to which she invited Julius, and one of his great collaborators, miki yui.

Though their meeting was brief in life, Rie has often worked in the context of his art and spirit, for instance, she performed Red, Yellow, Blue with Junko Wada and miki yui tributing his art at 'At the moment of being heard' (South London Gallery, 2013).

DAVID TOOP & ROSS LAMBERT

“The 3 who are afraid

Scissor-paper-stone

This collaboration began with a tone.
At one of David's concerts last year I was struck by an immensely icy, dripping sound that his Telecaster and the trusty Oto Twin Reverb were making and remarked later that Albert Collins seemed to be living in it, the only, and rather obvious, point of reference I could think of at the time.

That glutamatic, umami sound of David's and then what we might sound like together eventually coalesced (for me) into first the metaphor of an open and a closed hand, and then the scissor-paper-stone game.

Mushi-ken, the earliest Japanese sansukumi-ken game (1809). From left to right: Slug (namekuji), frog (kawazu), and snake (hebi).

David observed that this game features heavily in a scene from Hou Hsiao Hsien's 1998 film 'Flowers of Shanghai' and further research uncovered more about its interesting origins.

We haven't played together before, at least not physically but we're not afraid. Well, no more than is necessary.”

Ross Lambert, 20 January 2016

Development sketch and photos: RL