A key figure in the history of Japanese twentieth-century minimalism, composer and performer Midori Takada will speak about her creative practice.
While for American and European musicians minimalism rather quickly turned into a fine-tuned institutional art practice, Takada chose minimalism as a purely personal path determined by, generally speaking, an intimate and bodily experience of art, rather than a certain social or intellectual position. This is why during her lecture at Garage she will deliberately distance herself from any current cultural or music discourses. An artist who always preferred unobvious and unpredictable ways in her music, as a young woman Takada refused to forge a career in the Berlin Symphonic Orchestra following her inaugural concert with them, joining the experimental Mkwaju Ensemble instead. Later, she recorded the album Through the Looking Glass within two days using her own equipment—a record that would be become genuinely iconic thirty years later. In parallel to that, Takada has been researching African polyrhythmic music and the culture of the East, as well as looking for points of intersection between the new classics and avant-garde jazz, ambient, and the traditional music of the peoples of Ghana, Senegal and Korea. More recently, she has turned her attention to biocybernetics, started performing in a theater, and creating scores for anime and computer games.
The lecture is organized in collaboration with ANDconcert.
The lecture coincides with Midori Takada’s concert that will take place at 20:00 on May 22 at Digital Business Space.