Tetuzi Akiyama 秋山徹次 + Toshimaru Nakamura 竹村延和 - Semi-Impressionism 蝉印象派
Country: JapanLabel: Spekk
Released: 22 Oct 2009
Genre: Electronica / Minimal / Experimental / Non-Music
Details:
Probably the most well-known figures in the international impro-scene hailing from Tokyo, Japan. They have toured extensively through the world leaving countless publications from labels worldwide. This is officially their 1st album as a duo based on 3 live recordings taken at Sweden and Austria.
While me and Tetuzi were playing in a city called Novisad, a local journalist came up to us. He seemed pretty drunk and we wanted to keep distance from him but the guy insisted “Let me speak one more word”.
At first with a tweaking voice and then loudly he claims “Zen Noise”. He probably meant “the Zen” noise but we were wondering what his point was at first. After few days, me and Tetuzi were on the land of Sweden. One morning, in a hotel lobby, we found a review of our performance on some newspaper. They noted our duo “Zen Impressionism”.
Comparing (if that is possible in the first place..) to the Zen knowledge of the average Japanese, mine is poor so I felt a little guilty being rewarded with such a magnificent word. At the same time, I felt the word “Zen” is being used so convenient and easily..
To tell the truth, we are used to playing abroad so I would say this isn’t the first time being expressed in that manner. When I was young, I felt sometimes irritated being said in this way. But now, I would just think “oh, just like always” or “haven’t been struck like this for a long time” and these comments wouldn’t really hurt or itch myself at all. But then again, and somehow this time, we got excited with a morning coffee discussing “we must not let this go, we have to drop a message to this”. So our action was to release a CD entitled “Zen Impressionist”. How brave! Anyway, so it means this CD existed before the quality of the sound.
We decided to express the “Zen” letter in calligraphy so we asked a calligrapher to draw the letter. Our hope was to have it drawn in a dynamic stroke to express the excellence of the word. And if it was written by a calligraphy brush, we also thought it would give foreigners an impression that they might have seen the word somewhere. When looking at the result of the drawing, we found out that the left part of the “Zen” letter was slightly different and instead formed the word “Semi (=cicadas)”.
Cicadas are noisy insects in the summertime. It turned out that the sample letter we provided to the calligrapher was miswritten. I guess the calligrapher also shook his head wondering why we had him write just the word “Semi”.
[Text by Toshimaru Nakamura]
