We can say now that Niigata is one of our favorite cities around the world! We landed there for a residency at YUI PORT, a community centre located in a former school building, where our two main contacts were Honoka Sato (assistant director) and Hiroyuki Ogawa (project director). Alongside them, we met two of the local residents who help as volunteers, Naoko Igarashi and her husband, who own a farm and gifted us and the other resident artist a 5 kg bag of rice as soon as we arrived. The couple had been recently displaced by the earthquake unfortunately, an event that affected the area greatly, and even friends of ours were affected and volunteered to help out where needed.
Our fellow resident Tatjana Preuss had already occupied the studio across the corridor with a quirky poetic installation piece called Misemono-Yatai, inspired by Japanese Dokodemo Misemono traditions as much as German project spaces. We also collaborated on one of the events around this installation, with a small sound performance to accompany an indoor picnic, including warm kotatsu and homemade buns by the local restaurant owner, Yoyo san.
Yoyo san would become a very dear friend of ours during our time in Niigata, feeding us with wonderful organic food, bringing friends to the events, organizing trips and driving us around, chatting about her time in Tokyo and her friendship with Hiroshi Yoshimura, and welcoming at her little restaurant called Mountain Grocery.
Another very precious friendship that we made in Niigata is Masato Hoshino, that we had previously contacted as he is the organizer of the concert series Experimental Rooms, besides running a beautiful ambient record label of the same name. Masato introduced us to all of his family and hosted us in his home for an unforgettable night of setsubun celebrations, that included tiramisu and sakura mochi, certain beans that you have to throw and possibly eat (mamemaki), and the ehou-maki, special sushi rolls that you have to eat in one go facing the most auspicious direction for luck.
In front of the photography studio in Shibata
Masato also took us to Shibata one day, mainly to visit another great personality, Yoshihara san in his beautiful historical photo studio. Around the corner, we also visited the start up coffee roaster of another friend. Soon, we would find out also that the city is linked to the name of a prominent anarchist in history. With Masato, we organized an exciting performance at Lowyard Records, which is one of the two nice record shop that we visited in Niigata, the other one being Sheyeye.
In the city, we also visited some more touristic spots, like the fish market, and some exhibitions at local museums. The city had a history in the world of geishas, and also is apparently famous because of the pop trio Negicco.
YUI-port was a lot of fun on its own, having a lot of activities always going on (including a lottery), offering us with a huge studio space (even if a bit hard to heat), a very rich storage space with left over materials that we would make use of for our work, a grand piano that we would use for preparing future projects. And the building is positioned so close to the ocean, which is very harsh and windy, and across the water we could always see Sado Island.
And it is with Yoyo san and our friend Asuna visiting us from Kanazawa that we would set off one early morning to catch the ferry toward Sado. After picking up a rental car (and being pulled over on the way…), we wandered here and there to visit some famous sites, including an ex prison, a flower shop, and the Kitazawa Flotation Plant. This last location in particular is quite notable, once a gold and silver ore processing plant, with large-scale facilities now in disarray. Nearby is just a lovely ceramic shop, and during the Sado Island Galaxy Art Festival Project 2020 it also hosted an epic performance by Terry Riley. With our fellow travellers we also had a memorable lunch eating fresh sushi with ocean view.
Yoyo testing the drum, testing the drummer
Finally we reached our ultimate destination, the house of KODO, the performing music ensemble that has an incredible history and impressive facilities too. Yuta came to welcome us, and introduced us to the rest of the group that was not currently touring, mainly formed by the young students. We got to try the biggest drums and to hear some unpublished music in the recording studio where Yuta also records KODO’s podcast.
At the hostel
A bit uncertain, we departed from Yoyo san and Asuna, who were already making their way back to Niigata (after meeting up with a friend and a quick visit to the onsen), while we reached our deserted hostel under a torrential rainfall. Our host was really surprised to see any visitor on the island during winter, and we felt a bit stranded at first considering there was not internet either. In the morning, we got up early to take a short walk toward the port and around some temples, before Yuta came to pick us up.
The plan for the day was for us to be present at one of the group rehearsals of the students. It was very impressive to see the type of discipline that the students are trained to, which included cleaning the rehearsal room floor, taking care of the needs of the guests, and more. We also shared a wonderful lunch with all of them, before heading toward the second location of the ensemble, which is an old school building a bit further away where students spend the first couple of years, training like crazy with morning runs in any weather. The atmosphere in this other location was so magical, and ghosts are told to be living there too, but we couldn’t see any; we could just feel the concentration of dreams and fears and hope that so many generations filled those spaces with. We were so lucky that a small group that was practicing shared a song with us: the students have to learn repertoire of the different folk traditions from around Japan, and this one song was really touching.
At Lowyard Records
It was just really beautiful to see how much the KODO musicians value their lifestyle and how much everyone else on the island keeps these musicians in very high esteem. After a quick visit to a sake factory, we were driven to the ferry station with the promise that we would meet again to play in Niigata.
One other trip that we carried out was offered to us by a new friend, a player of shakuhachi, who drove us to another town to share with us some special sandwich and a visit to a temple.
The instruments we built for our project in Niigata
One of the highest points of our residency was a workshop that we shared with the community, where we focused on simple polyrhythms and syllabic rhythms, while using big size musical instruments that we had built during the residency.
After Niigata, we had a touring plan with three concerts in the north: our first stop was the city of Akita, where we were set to perform at the Cultural Center, a beautiful venue that organizes many activities, exhibitions, residencies and more. The city seemed to have very interesting connection to folk arts including dance, music, and masks, but we did not have time to explore any of this. We only got to celebrate with the usual izakaya after the performance.
The next trip already took at to the opposite shore of the island, exactly in Aomori, where we were sharing the stage with a local band during a very snowy evening. But the most remarkable event of that show happened afterwards, as one of the attendees who is also a young fisherman offered all of us some fresh blue crab to eat on the spot - what a treat! We will really bring that memory with us forever.
A final performance took place in Sendai, which was part of a longer lineup including some singer songwriters, but again some of the most cherished memories are related to food (gyutan, which is beef tongue, and some sushi belt right before the concert), and the visit to the beautiful library.
With an overnight bus we finally reached Tokyo, where we were staying at a capsule hotel in the Shinjuku area. We shared a nice afternoon eating Taiwanese desserts with Juli and Yasushi (inoyamaland), we visited the exhibition dedicated to Ryuchi Samakoto at the ICC Intercommunication Center, we got to see a concert with a lot of modular acts at the quite recently opened Polaris venue, and we celebrated one last night in the city with one last ramen bowl and a Kabuki show at the Kabuki-za theatre.