Aki Onda + Akio Susuki + Takehito Koganezawa @ Ausland Berlin | Thursday, 19.06.2014

Extraordinary Japanese sound artists Aki Onda and Akio Suzuki, who have been collaborating extensively recent years, and recently released their first album “ma ta ta bi” teams up with Berlin based visual artist Takehito Koganezawa. The three performers present three hours extended durational performance responds to the architecture of the performance space, with the audience free to move around.
[vimeo 92767248 w=620&h=300]

Aki Onda is an electronic musician, composer, and visual artist. He is particularly known for his Cassette Memories project – works compiled from a “sound diary” of field-recordings collected by Onda over a span of two decades. Onda’s musical instrument of choice is the cassette Walkman.

Not only does he capture field recordings with the Walkman, he also physically manipulates multiple Walkmans with electronics in his performances. In another of his projects, Cinemage, Onda shows slide projections of still photo images, shot by himself, as a performance or installation. Onda has collaborated with artists such as Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Paul Clipson, Alan Licht, Loren Connors, MV Carbon, Oren Ambarchi, Noël Akchoté, Jean-François Pauvros, Jac Berrocal, Lionel Marchetti, Linda Sharrock, and Blixa Bargeld.

httpv://https://youtube.com/watch?v=r7OHqJqlG28

Akio Suzuki is known as a pioneer of sound art, but the breadth of his activities and the form of his works far exceeds the normal boundaries of sound art. It is perhaps more as a “quester after sound and space” that he has received the most attention from artists in many fields.

During the 60’s, he began his “self-study events”. For four years he worked as a sound researcher, studying the sound qualities of places in nature and architectural spaces. He investigates places by constructing a topography of sound based on the principle of call and echo. The intensive study during the 1970’s of the phenomenon of reverberation or echo inspired him to invent his own instruments, such as the glass harmonica à la Suzuki and the ANALAPOS spiral echo instrument.

httpv://https://youtube.com/watch?v=jDTbxujcLx0

Takehito Koganezawa is a Video artist, draughtsmann and performer.
For Koganezawa, every place on this planet holds its own sense of time. He does not attempt to arrest time in his works: on the contrary he allows time to move like waves on the sea. He contemplates the question of how to grasp a stream. Drawing is for Koganezawa a kind of primal stream.

He is interested in how to blend streams and how to construct something new from such a mixture. In this, the motion that is perception always passes through the entire body. Weightlessness plays a crucial role in this context. By defying gravity Koganezawa’s work bears a relation to music, which he partly composes himself as a soundtrack to his videos. Listening thus becomes the finest form of “seeing”.
(Excerpt from Katja Blomberg “LUFTLINIEN”)