Our Correspondents: TokyoAs of June 1, 2007, this page will no longer be updated. Please visit our new site to access newly added programs. Hosted by Kazue Kobata |
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Edition #21: Music as Sensual Tie, Pt. 3 - Dead Man - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast July 3, 2006 Ryuichi Daijo plays selections the Neil Young soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch's film, Dead Man. (30 minutes) |
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Edition #20: Keiji Haino - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast December 26, 2005 Japan's rocker/free improv musician (since 1970s) Keiji Haino appears on WPS1 for the first time, with an ad-hoc group, Mitochondria Quartet, with 4 young musicians on strings. Haino is active around the world, often at NYC's Tonic and other cosmopolitan music scenes. He is also known for being omnivorous in terms of the instruments he plays and collects, including his own voice and body. He is skinny, very long-haired, in black clothes head to toe, and wearing dark glasses all the time. In this public gig with younger musicians, he started by playing cymbals and drums, and in the latter joint session he provoked them with hyper energy as well as with vocalization and guitar playing. Mitochondria Quartet (nothing to do with Ellington's Alexandra Quartet), Takuya Takahashi, guitar and percussion Jun Kawasaki, bass Takashi Ueno, sax, misc. Ryuichi Daijo, guitar. (29 minutes) |
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Edition #19: Music as Sensual Tie, Pt. 2 - Curio or Virtuoso - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast November 14, 2005 Young Japanese guitarist and WPS1/Tokyo's resident musician and engineer Ryuichi Daijo introduces The Shaggs, USA, and Starfuckers, Italy, with an undermined hypothesis that the two groups have an enigmatic commonness--well-prepared or not, well-trained or not, you may observe light-hearted but uniquely enjoyable sounds. The Shaggs has a nice family story, and their amateurish music is now covered by some hot groups. The Starfuckers is soft, quiet, but also sharp and meditative. Comments by Ryuichi Daijo, produced by Kazue Kobata. (29 minutes) Playlist 01 The Shaggs - Philosophy of the World 2:00 02 The Shaggs - That Little Sports Car 3:00 03 The Shaggs - My Companion 2:30 04 The Shaggs - I'm So Happy When You'er Near 2:06 05 Starfuckers - DDE 3:14 06 Starfuckers - Distribuice Pastiglie 4:42 07 The Shaggs - Things I Wonder 2:12 08 Starfuckers - Chiodi 4:03 |
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Edition #18: Improv Vets and Novitiates - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast December 12, 2005 A private session for WPS1: Innovative composer/performer and maker of avant garde opera Tristan Honsinger, a cellist born in USA but more active in Europe, was on tour in Japan in September 2005. Kazue Kobata, WPS1 Tokyo Correspondent, happens to be his good friend and producer, and they set up a truly ad-hoc private session at a quaint local club downtown Tokyo, during the afternoon off-business hours and without an audience. The aim was to set up an interface between vets and novitiates of freely improvised music. Two other musicians joined: Shuichi Chino, a vet on piano, and guitarist Ryuichi Daijo, a novitiate with 2 years experience. The session was conducted truly with good intentions, with some suggestions regarding combination and playing unit time, and the result is a nice, warm, private session where WPS1's audience is invited for the first time before anyone else. (59 minutes) |
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Edition #17: Yokohama Trienniale 2005 - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast October 31, 2005 A special program on the Yokohama Triennale 2005 (Oct. 28-Dec. 18) with its theme of Art Circus and action program Jumping from the Ordinary. The program's special reporter is Alanna Heiss, Director of P.S.1 and WPS1 who contributes eight interviews with artists on the exhibition site (Shigeo Anzai, Japan; Miguel Calderon, Mexico; Shaun Gladwell, Australia; SOI group, Thailand; Long March, China; Craig Walsh, Australia; Nari Ward, Jamaica; and Yuken Teruya, Okinawa, Japan). Heiss and WPS1's Tokyo correspondent (and PS1's Adjunct Curator) Kazue Kobata also have a real art-mafia talk (pajama party) with the Triennale's Artistic Director Tadashi Kawamata, and guest Jonathan Watkins, Director of the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK. The Triennale is characterized by its free-form festive and cheerful atmosphere interfacing everyday life and art-for-everyone on one hand, and mature and serious art on the other, such as in works by Chen Zen, Daniel Buren and Tadasu Takamine. (90 minutes) |
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Edition #16: Music as Sensual Tie, Pt. 1 - listen | listen with RealPlayer First broadcast February 21, 2005 Narrator and guitarist Ryuichi Daijo introduces a Chilean folklore guitarist/composer Violeta Parra (1917-1967), who composed and played music derived from her love for folklore. Daijo plays and comments on several of her songs from a CD "Composiciones para Guitarra," from Warner Music Chile, 1999 (original recording 1961). Parra also began weaving and painting late in life and her figures of people, animals, and plants assumed fanciful, often surrealistic and distorted forms. Between dream and reality, the images were clearly drawn from the same folk tradition that inspired her music. She committed suicide in 1967. Playlist 01 El Joven Serjio 02 Antincueca 1 & 2 03 Anticueca Larga 04 El Gavilan Gavilan |
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Edition #15: Improvised and Minimal - listen | listen with RealPlayer Kazue Kobata provides illuminating commentary on this performance of improvised music by contemporary international musicians playing live at Plan B in Tokyo. The bill includes British sax player John Butcher, Tokyo's Otomo Yoshihide (playing his turntables with a contact microphone and no records), Rhodri Davies of Wales, on a harp he plays with two electronic bows, and superminimalist Toshimaru Nakamura adding the electronic chrirps, hisses, murmurs and buzzes. Ryuichi Daijo did the selecting and editing for this program. Playlist 01 Duo by John Butcher and Yoshihide Otomo 02 Solo by Rhodri Davies 03 Duo by Butcher and Nakamura 04 Improvisation by all four players |
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Edition #14: Voices from Okinawa and Korea, Pt. 2 - listen | listen with RealPlayer A musical counterpart to producer and curator Kazue Kobata's P.S.1 exhibition, "The Perpetual Moment: Visions from within Okinawa and Korea", with photographs depicting the effect of American military bases on their turf. The program features the musical traditions of the two peoples spiced with contemporary New Wave touches. Playlist Okinawa
01 "Sagi Chiju Ya (Prover)" - traditional Island song (Shima Uta) on sanshin, a banjo-like
3-string instrument, played by a master, Rinsho Kadekaru. An elegy.
02 "Rappa Bushi" - a kind of dialogical rap song by Rinsho Kadekaru and Haruko Higa.
Comical entertainment.
03 "Kadi-ku" - another Island song featuring tongue-twisting onomatopoeia by master
Shoei Kina on sanshin, and vocal.
04 "Tsukino Kaisha" ("Beautiful Moon") - vocal by a Deva, Misako Koja and her group,
Nehnehz (Sisters). A romantic ballad.
05 "Shichigachi Eisah-Eisah for July" - a festive song with drum and bamboo castanet for
dancing procession on the midsummer day of Buddhist ancestor worship. Lead vocal and
sanshin by Sadao China.
Korea 06 "Kot Sang Yo: Portable Shrine with Flowers" - female solo by young master Kwon Soon Kang, with a drum and string orchestra in the Junga tradition. This is music for a funeral procession: the shrine contains a coffin. 07 "Frog Song"- by a New Wave male singer, Kim Yong Woo. "Kegol Kegol" is the sound of a frog, and the lyric goes with a housewife sighing - in unison with the frog - while waiting for her husband and sons to come home for dinner. 08 "Samul-Nori" - drumming and singing and whirling dance (with long-tailed headgear) by four men. This traditional folk art dates from medieval times. It was only in the late 1970's that young Kim Dok Soo and his group restored the art, and they continue to marvel people in Korea and around the world. |
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Edition #13: Voices from Okinawa and Korea, Pt. 1 - listen | listen with RealPlayer Correspondent Kazue Kobata provides illuminating commentary for "The Perpetual Moment: Visions from within Okinawa and Korea", the photo exhibition she has organized for the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, drawing unexpected parallels between the continued American presence in Korea and that in Iraq. Here she introduces the six artists in the exhibition who also participated in an October 19, 2004 symposium at the Peace Education Center at Columbia University, held in conjunction with the show. |
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Edition #12: Narration Music - listen | listen with RealPlayer Kazue Kobata speaks to (and translates) Tsuguhiko Egawa, a young performer and composer whose music is an unusual form of speech that he has invented from overheard conversations and soundtracks. During the interview, he sings both a cappella and accompanies himself on - of all things - the ukulele. Fascinating. |
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Edition #11: Self-made Instruments, Pt. 2 - listen | listen with RealPlayer P.S. 1 Adjunct Curator Kazue Kobata presents Act III in a live concert by musicians playing instruments of their own invention. This one features visual and sound artist Atsuhiro Ito, with his "optron," as well as an instrument that resembles a can but is so far ahead of its time that no name has yet caught up with it. Recorded at Tokyo's Plan B in August, 2004. Atsuhiro Ito is a visual as well as a sound artist with two solo CDs to his credit. He has also produced CDs by other musicians for the Off Site label in Japan. His instrument, the optron, is partly a fluorescent light fixture whose on-off flickers contribute to the sound. His other instrument is a motorized and amplified, metallic device made from the parts of an electric fan. Toward the end of the concert, he joins two other self-made instrument specialists, Junji Hirose and Tomomi Adachi, for a joint session of very avant-garde sounds that nearly bring John Cage back from the grave. |
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Edition #10: Self-made Instruments, Pt. 1 - listen | listen with RealPlayer The self-made instrument almost literally comes alive in this concert, presented by P.S.1 Adjunct Curator Kazue Kobata and recorded at Tokyo's Plan B. Tomomi Adachi plays two instruments: first, a Tomo-Ring (a percussion instrument resembling a xylophone but made of combs, strainers, an electric toothbrush, springs, platters and a personal fan); and then a Tomo-Ming, a humming, Theremin-type oscillator that he plays by moving his hands over it (if you listen closely, you will also hear him play a fife made out of a zucchini). The program's second half features Junji Hirose who is an improvisational saxophonist. The instrument he plays here, however, has no name. It is made of two bicycle wheels mounted on a metallic stand (thank you, Marcel Duchamp!) and is played with cymbals, sticks, knitting needles, a violin bow and other gadgets. |
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Edition #9: Wakamatsu Masadayu and Shizuru Otaka - listen | listen with RealPlayer Plan B is an artist-run performance space in Tokyo founded in 1981. Wakamatsu Masadayu extends a medieval oral tradition developed by traveling musicians with story-songs that can last up to six hours. This is an excerpt. Also on the program is Shizuru Otaka, a classically trained singer who also enjoys a career in commercial pop, with several hundred recordings to her credit, a band called Futon Logic, and a very particular way with every kind of song, in Japanese and English. |
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Edition #8: Ryuichi Ohata and Kazumi Nikaido - listen | listen with RealPlayer Continuing her series of live concerts from the artist-run Plan B in Tokyo, Kazue Kobata presents Ryuichi Ohata and Kazumi Nikaido, two guitar-slinging singer-songwriters on the rise. |
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Edition #7: Samm Bennett, Wataru Okuma and Suichi Chino - listen | listen with RealPlayer Host Kazue Kobata introduces live performances by veteran electronic musicians Samm Bennett, Wataru Okuma and Suichi Chino during this concert at Plan B, the Tokyo artists' collective and performance space founded in 1982, and dedicated to WPS1 radio. |
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Edition #6: Ryuichi Daijo, Tsuguhiko Egawa, Takuya Takahashi - listen | listen with RealPlayer Plan B has served as a leading venue for experimental work in music, theater, dance and film since 1982. This startling concert features several genertions of musicians playing music in free-form. Here is Part 1, featuring guitarist Ryuichi Daijo with vocals by Tsuguhiko Egawa. Composer Takuya Takahashi, a frequent collaborator with the Min Tanaka Dance Company, follows with an improvised set on acoustic guitar. |
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Edition #4: Derek Bailey - listen | listen with RealPlayer Tokyo correspondent Kazue Kobata speaks to legendary guitar improviser Derek Bailey about "Rain Dance." |
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Edition #3 - listen | listen with RealPlayer Kazue Kobata encounters two representatives of Tuvan throat-singing, Japanese-style. |
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Edition #2 - listen | listen with RealPlayer Kazue Kobata reports from Tokyo on the Cicala Muta, a Chin Don band - traditionally trained, Pied-Piperlike musicians who appear in the streets in costume to attract crowds for shop promotions. And that's not all! Kazue also introduces western ears to Komatcha Klezmer - Yep! klezmer music, Japanese style? |
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Edition #1: Ryuichi Daijo - listen | listen with RealPlayer Kazue Kobata invites the young guitar improvisationist Ryuichi Daijo to play and speak about his music. The self-taught guitarist Ryuichi Daijo was born in 1978 in Yokohama, Japan. He has been giving solo concerts since 2004, and regulary participated in performances with public ennsembles. Ryuichi is highly influenced by punk rock, and focuses mainly on improvisation. He has been WPS1's Our Correspondent: Tokyo's resident musician and engineer since the radio's inauguration. |
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Edition #0 - listen | listen with RealPlayer Kazue Kobata reports from Tokyo on several musicians and bands currently turning heads in Japan. |
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