Field Studies at the Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design, Spring 2014

As I arrived for the Field Studies workshop at the  Sir John Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design on 16 April, the legendary Akio Suzuki was preparing for his talk. Donning his customary tight-fitting hat and with his grey beard, he almost looked like one of Hayao Miyazaki’s avuncular and wise protagonists.

Suzuki began playing mesmerising music with his hand-made instrument ANALAPOS, looking much like a child’s telephone contraption, a tube joining together two can-like shapes. The sounds emitted sounded like water, then like roaring, then like a chain of echoes.

Akio Suzuki then went on to talk about himself, his words translated into English by Aki Onda.

Suzuki was 23 when he started studying music. Nature was his great and inspiring teacher. Suzuki had been studying architecture at university but didn’t get on with his teachers, and dropped out.

He thought, mistakenly as it turned out, that nature would be nice to him. Nature wasn’t friendly, but incredibly scary and Suzuki nearly died at its hands on a couple of occasions.  Nature told him to study more and harder.

Suzuki became passionate about echoes and any sort of natural environment which caused these echoes. He devoted much of his time to learning about echoes in the mountains.

His Eureka moment came in the 1970s when he discovered, quite by chance. that the sound produced by playing on metal cans connected by means of a coil, effectively can create varying echoes.

He had an assortment of objects in his studio which produced new sounds, something new when played together.

As a child Suzuki was not allowed to play instruments at night as this was said to anger the snake with eight faces. This snake was worshipped by agricultural communities in Japan, who had to keep him appeased in order to secure a good harvest.

Suzuki stressed the importance of nature to Eastern cultures, as they have relied heavily on agriculture. He recounted that once, when visiting Bali, he started making noise with stones. The kids in the town copied him. The cacophony of sound coincided with the beginning of rain. This unexpected rain enraged the town’s mayor who ordered Suzuki to stop playing music with the stones. Putting the stones aside, the rain cleared, further convincing the mayor of Suzuki’s responsibility for the downfall.

Suzuki went on to say that it never rains when he performs at festivals.

Festival producers could do worse than inviting him to perform in order to ensure a dry festival!

Aki Onda            

Aki Onda, an electronic musician, composer and visual artist, then spoke about his influences, thus contextualising his own brand of music.

He worked as a photographer from the age of 15. At one point his camera broke, but he was impoverished and unable to replace it. With little money, he ended up buying a second-hand Walkman in Brixton market instead and used this to document his surroundings.

Aki Onda grew up in Japan, but found school stifling and could not obey the rules. He couldn’t fit into Japanese society very easily for various reasons including his family background which was liberal and artistic, his half-Korean origin and his ambiguous sexuality. Having been exposed to a wider world of academia and art through his father, an academic, and his mother, a painter, he aspired for other horizons and stopped going to school.

He also stopped talking for five years, between the ages of 11 or 12 and 15 or 16. He started taking at photos at this time and realized that he was good at doing so. As a teen he sought solace in avant-garde arts and cinema.

Onda became depressed however, mainly as a result of not communicating. He felt an outsider and, blocking out his past, he began a new life, documenting everything via cassettes this time.

He began recovering and dealing with his trauma, the memories of which never truly go away. He worked as a music producer in his twenties. After that, he began performing music since 2003.

Ending with a smile, having successfully navigated memories of his troubled life, Onda’s talk was followed by the keynote lecture, given by composer, musician, author, curator and academic, Professor David Toop.

Toop was very modest and admitted a distaste for keynote speeches. He began by encouraging the audience to think of words beginning with the prefix ‘un’. There were no restrictions to the words the audience could conjure up as he himself made up and offered ‘unmusic’ and ‘uncurating’, indicating his dislike for much of current music and curation.

While he continued to speak in a quiet voice, Onda was walking around creating feedback with a walkie-talkie like contraption and then playing sounds with his hand-held synthesizer and amplifier. Suzuki was making beautifully rhythmic music with stones and daily objects he found at the venue such as paper tubes. A guest musician, Rie Nakajima was playing her own assortment of instruments made by her on the floor and Toop himself was playing a prepared guitar and bamboo flute. As this awesome ensemble continued to clandestinely perform, a projector screen which Toop had been using to illustrate his talk, showed clips from Chinese films and photos of temples, adding to a rather exotic and wonderful atmosphere.

It was pure fun.

Field Studies is organised by Joseph Kohlmaier and Musarc, a research project at the Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University.