Haiku In The Wide World

Description

Multi-generic, exquisitely orchestrated and haunted by silence, this 64-minute CD for voice, piano, percussion, harp, violin, viola, clarinets, French horn, acoustic and electric guitars, as well as electronic and concrete sounds, offers 37 very different musical settings of Japanese Haiku. The project was born in lockdown when poet Harry Gilonis decided to mark each day by translating one haiku from the Japanese. For a hundred days, Tim Hodginson was one of the email recipients of these labours. Tim: I wasn't sure what to make of this obsessive procedure, or, indeed, what to make of the poems themselves, but something about them slowly insinuated itself into my mind. I first thought of setting them to music sometime in mid 2023...[and], from the very beginning the point, was not to set individual haiku as stand-alone, inspired, moments but to set a whole series of them as an extended network of sonic inter-relationships.... Atsuko Kamura, with whom I had already worked [on Yumi Hara's Lindsay Cooper songbook], was [I thought] someone who would excel at singing across the kind of abrupt changes in genre and sound-world I was beginning to imagine [since] these songs are situated in an extremely wide musical space, not only in the sense of being surrounded by silence and tending towards economies of texture, but also in the sense of being free from any over-all uniformity of genre, technique, sound-world, or style.' HAIKU Historically, haiku originate as the opening stanzas of much longer poems called renga, produced in real-time collective poetry-making sessions in which individuals contradicted, parodied or extended each other's contributions. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that the influential poet, critic and editor Masaoka Shiki, a huge fan of the West, declared that renga was dead, and that haiku - originally just the first three lines - were autonomous poems. At the same time the cult-like status accorded to Basho by many in Japan isolated him from his historical context and added a saintly aura - and this was the image of the haiku-poet-as-Zen-monk that was propagated in the West by the great translator and haiku specialist R.H.Blyth from the 1940's onwards. TIM HODGKINSON Tim Hodgkinson is a composer who plays lap steel guitar, clarinets, and saxophones. Whilst studying social anthropology at Cambridge he co-founded Henry Cow with Fred Frith in 1968 and then, two years after Henry Cow's disbandment, The Work, in 1980, followed by K-Space and Konk Pack. In addition to composing, he has long been involved with improvisation, returning to anthropology in the 1990s with research into music and shamanism in Siberia. Recent performances include his Piano Concerto for Daan Vandewalle with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Liege at Ars Musica, Liege, in Jan 2023 and Under the Void, (2018) for the Phoenix Ensemble, premiered at the Gare du Nord, Basel, in April 2023. http://www.timhodgkinson.co.uk ATSUKO KAMURA One of Tokyo's most emotive and inventive artists, and a member of Japan's '80's women's liberation movement, Kamura was a founder member of the first Japanese all-female punk band, Mizutama Shobodan, also known as Polkadot Fire Brigade, formed in Tokyo, in 1979. She teamed up with singer Tenko as improvisation vocal duo Honeymoons in 1981, developing a unique style of avant-noise improvisation and performing internationally with New York improvisers Tom Cora and John Zorn, as well as at the International Women's Music Festival in Montreal, in 1988. In the same year Kamura joined Kazuko Hohki's UK-based Japanese pop group Frank Chickens, touring Europe, the US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, USSR and Japan. She also worked as a traditional Benshi narrator performing A Page of Madness with her own original soundtrack at Film Fest, in Portugal. Recently she released 4am Diary, on which, according to Stewart Lee in The Idler, "she douses the anti-musical strategies of the late-seventies Rock In Opposition movement ... with a soupcon of fizzy electrics; her operatic voice navigating an echoing mirror maze of pulses and tones."