It doesn't hurt to remember that August 1945 marked the only two occasions when The Bomb has been dropped, and that the USA did it. Japanese artist Chiho Harazaki deals with the memory through linear art. And L.A. musician Matt Piper assembled an international quartet to deal with it through improvisation.
Harazaki's images applied deceptive simplicity to the brutal contrasts of mass destruction. She presented a scene of ordinary life, the relaxed faces of strolling townies indicated by elemental eyes and mouths. Then, in the same style, she gave us a pile of bodies. Since Harazaki cuts and assembles her precise lines from adhesive tape, we gleaned an impression of enormous care and focus, different from most illustration in its ritual devotion. And the basic humanity on display brought home the ultimate cost of war.
Harazaki transformed a mushroom cloud into a baroque decoration, attached a broken building to a broken mind, centered a gun-busting Buddha within a huge neon mandala. She demands beauty.
The quartet did too. Motoko Honda can express any emotion through an acoustic piano, this time aligning herself with Harazaki by literally placing tape on the wires to produce sounds similar to the Japanese koto, and by sequencing intense dissonances with birdlike flights of spirit. On four woodwinds, Vinny Golia followed her lead with alacrity, and she followed his. The whole ensemble was also deeply concerned with texture: Golia coaxed split tones from a 6-foot vertical flute that must have required four pallbearers to carry, and Piper augmented remarkably sensitive bass lines with frightening gushes of electronic distortion. On Indian drums and assorted percussion, Satnam Ramgotra served as driving force, anchor, and link to a transcendent tradition. Tuned in doesn't begin to say it.
This event was special on several levels. We were left wondering whether it's appropriate to draw beauty from horror, and whether those who want to survive can afford to leave beauty behind.
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PHOTO BY DAVÍD TAUHÍD.