Basho + Still Forms

Description

The title of this work by Beatrice Dillon is taken from the notion of "basho", developed by Kitarō Nishida, a Japanese philosopher and the father of the Kyoto School. "Basho" refers to a fundamental "place" or "field" where things exist and interact. It is not just a physical location, but a more abstract space where all experiences, thoughts and phenomena are interconnected. Inspired by this idea, Beatrice Dillon develops complex music that constantly constitutes itself as pure presentation, reactivating at every moment both the object of attention and the listener who focuses on it. Drawing on electronic music for both its sounds and its idioms, Basho is a diversion, a rearrangement that places us, through familiar yet suddenly foreign elements, in a field of pure listening. Still Forms, by Japanese composer Hideki Umezawa, draws its sound material from the exploration of Baschet sound structures, instruments developed by brothers Bernard and François Baschet in the 1950s. Through various recording sessions, in Japan but also in France, Hideki Umezawa re-explores the fascinating sonic potential of these atypical instruments to include them in a highly controlled composition where acoustically generated sounds and electronic textures echo each other, as in the distorted reflection of the Baschet structures' resonators.