This was the only event at this year's FIMAV not held on a stage. For the show, NY-based sound artist, Aki Onda, set up a table filled with electronic doo-dads of various descriptions. Across the room from him, Akio Suzuki (one of Japan's earliest practitioners of sound art) stood amidst what looked like a pile of garbage, holding a pair of violin bows.
This was the start of a rather quiet concert, more a series of parallel improvisations than something that seemed particularly inter-communicative. Suzuki used the bows to coax a variety of small sounds out of cardboard, a wooden desk drawer and a vertical post. The love-volume amplification he used managed to transform the raw sounds into a sequence of recognizable musical events.
Meanwhile, Onda, representing a younger generation of sonic explorers, walked around twiddling knobs, dropping marbles into cymbals and carrying a portable loudspeaker slowly through the audience. It was actually pretty neat as theatre, but wasn't as musically involving or mysterious as Suzuki's work.
This was the start of a rather quiet concert, more a series of parallel improvisations than something that seemed particularly inter-communicative. Suzuki used the bows to coax a variety of small sounds out of cardboard, a wooden desk drawer and a vertical post. The love-volume amplification he used managed to transform the raw sounds into a sequence of recognizable musical events.
Meanwhile, Onda, representing a younger generation of sonic explorers, walked around twiddling knobs, dropping marbles into cymbals and carrying a portable loudspeaker slowly through the audience. It was actually pretty neat as theatre, but wasn't as musically involving or mysterious as Suzuki's work.
