Yumiko Morioka, Nick Luscombe & James Greer

Resonance, the seminal 1987 Japanese environmental music work, receives its European live premiere as Yumiko Morioka performs alongside collaborators Nick Luscombe and James Greer of MSCTY Studio.

The trio will also present their new work, Music for Rest Rooms.

Yumiko's Resonance was once overlooked before being rediscovered by a new generation of listeners. While it is regarded as a classic of the Japanese kankyō ongaku style of the 1980s, it is not rooted in the synth textures or natural sounds usually associated with that genre. Instead, it merges Satie's simple piano phrasings with Brian Eno's ambient minimalism, and focuses on the space between the carefully chosen notes, as a representation of the Japanese concept of 間 (ma).

The album was reissued by the Métron record label in 2020, and quickly sold out, much to the surprise of Morioka, whose understated modesty mirrors the sounds heard on the record. At that time Nick Luscombe interviewed Morioka for his radio show, and was astonished to learn that she had never performed the album live. Soon after, Nick, together with his MSCTY Studio co-producer James Greer, convinced her to perform the music live for the first time, and accompanied her in new reinterpretations of it, presented in Thailand and Japan. This concert marks the first time that music from Resonance has been performed live outside of Asia.

Alongside the selections from Resonance, they will present music from their new project Music for Rest Rooms, which imagines a new type of public space where sound offers containment, decompression, or gentle reorientation. Based on the power of multisensorial memory to evoke a sense of peace and rest, the work plays on a series of experiences the trio shared in a remote part of Gunma prefecture, Japan, presenting music as impression, feeling, moment, and scent.