I had a nice time with very nice people from Musiq'3. Thank you, André Défossez and Anne Mattheeuws.
To listen to the podcast
new track on Beyond the Horizon, Audition Records
Very happy to announce that a Berlin-based label, Audition Records released "Beyond the Horizon", compiled by my favorite sound artist, Seiji Morimoto, inviting Japanese sound artists (I love). I participated with my new live sound piece using water drops and feedback, made at the residency, La Pommerie, last summer, played on new porcelain bowls fabricated at CRAFT, a well-known ceramic research center in Limoges. Other artists included in the compilation are Tetsuya Umeda, Minoru Sato, Keitetsu Murai and Satoshi Yashiro. Thanks so much, Seiji.
free to download http://www.auditionrecords.com/ar050.html
working on organic feedback drones....
Composed exclusively with feedback using hydrophones, water and porcelain bowls.Feedback occurs with each bowl tuned on certain frequencies depending on the quantity of water. I manipulate with hands the balance between calm water stabilizing and accelerating feedback and waves moving and interrupting feedback tones. Feeling like I become wind…!Multi-tracked and half speeded in part.
Nagi (calm) - rough mix by tomokosauvage
A Rainbow in Curved Water
sound installation with melting ice and performance at GRIMMUSEUM, Berlin, 3-7 Nov, for "Whistle, Minotaure!" series curated by Francesco Cavaliere & Marcel Türkowsky
click the image to see more photos of the exhibition and performance
cLaura Gianetti
( ( ( This work was made possible by warm support of Francesco Cavaliere, Marcel Türkowsky and Enrico Centonze (Grimmuseum). Very special thanks to Seiji Morimoto and his family.) ) )
-artist's statement-
The clouds above, a drop of water falling onto the surface of water, rippling, oscillating and sometimes droning... then a shower, adding colors to leaves….
My obsession with water has developed a musical instrument which today looks like a ritual equipment for rain. Water is a living element. I have to take care of it everyday. Stagnant water mutes my bowls. They need constant flow and waves of water to sing. During the week of 'Whistle, Minotaure!', the water will be treated every day to make the clouds and rainfalls.
The unstable and fragile nature of the instrument demands intimacy of space and time. The quietness makes environment audible. A long performance is a good form for the slowness of the music and the sensual relation to the element. Rather cyclic structure suits the life of water.
My current musical passion is audio feedback with hydrophones and speakers creating drones swaying with water waves. I tune 7 bowls with 7 hydrophones to meet the frequency where feedback occurs and see with the room acoustics if a rainbow appears, a rainbow tuned with natural overtones.
"A Rainbow in Curved Water" is inspired by "A Rainbow in Curved Air" (Terry Riley, 1969).
Review and recording of a duo set with MC Schmidt at High Zero Festival, Baltimore
LINK to the original article and recording on the site of NPR (National Public Radio, US)
Surrounded by porcelain bowls, a mixer, effects pedals and bottles of Perrier, we sat rapt with curiosity as Tomoko Sauvage took the stage of the Theatre Project with Matmos member M.C. Schmidt. Sauvage poured carbonated water into the bowl closest to her, and she manipulated and looped the movements of the water itself, accented by the tranquil clinks of porcelain. Suspended above her mic stands were paper cups filled with water. It's a water dripping system with cotton thread periodically releasing drips into the bowls below. It was an elegant (and more palatable) solution to John Cage's chance operations, responding to random droplets with loops and delays through a mixer.
For Schmidt's part, he spent the first half of the duo's improvisation clinking metal cups against the theater's railing, which you can faintly hear in the recording above. When the Matmos member returned to the stage, he slurped Yuengling beer, which added a bit of comic relief to the very New Age-y proceedings. But his was never a vulgar response to his aquatic partner. His best touches came in washed-over synths, bringing to mind German ambient masters Cluster. I could have listened to this set all night.
by Lars Gotrich
review of "ombrophilia" by Benoit Deuxant
for La Sélec n°10, magazine de la Médiathéque de la communauté Française de Belgique
Une grande part de la difficulté de la musique expérimentale, pour celui ou celle qui la pratique, consiste à trouver sa voie, une voie qui soit sinon unique, du moins personnelle. Non qu’il s’agisse simplement de se distinguer des autres artistes par un gimmick, un « truc » qui semble original, mais parce que c’est le principe même de cette musique que d’être perpétuellement en quête de nouvelles voies, de nouvelles sonorités, de nouvelles formes de jeu. Pour beaucoup de musiciens, trouver son instrument constitue ainsi la partie la plus difficile du travail artistique. La rencontre avec l’instrument peut alors devenir une révélation, l’illumination qui détermine une vie.
Ce fut le cas de Tomoko Sauvage lorsqu’elle découvrit le Jalatharangam lors d’un concert à la cité de la musique à Paris. Aanayampatti Ganesan, héritier d’une longue lignée de musicien pratiquant cette discipline, y venait interpréter un récital exceptionnel sur cet instrument indien rare, constitué d’une série de bols de porcelaine, remplis d’eau à hauteur variable, et joué avec des baguettes de bambou. Le son qui en résulte évoque tantôt le xylophone tantôt le gamelan, et la fluidité de l’eau permet des variations subtiles, des modulations particulières que le Jalatharangam est seul à permettre. Son charme est d’être extrêmement facile à construire – puisqu’il suffit de se procurer quelques bols – et de se prêter à toutes sortes de modifications, de prolongements. Tomoko Sauvage a ainsi remplacé le principe des baguettes de bambou par une série de goutte-à-goutte placés au-dessus des bols, et plongé dans ceux-ci des micros hydrophones captant les ondulations de l’eau et répercutant en les amplifiant les impacts des gouttelettes fracassant la surface. En imprimant un léger roulis au liquide, elle obtient manuellement, de manière naturelle, un effet étonnant de glissement spectral, une surprenante modification de la qualité voyelle du son, ce que nous appellerons plus simplement un effet wah-wah. Dispositif à fois virtuose et désarmant de simplicité, il a la beauté des choses élémentaires, des choses premières, et évoque une fascination quasi enfantine pour le son de l’eau sous toutes ses formes, la pluie, les vagues, le ressac. Par delà son homogénéité extrême – de l’eau frappant de l’eau – l’instrument suggère d’autres associations d’idée : certains morceaux rappellent ainsi le gamelan, le carillon, les bols tibétains, ou encore le glass-harmonica de Benjamin Franklin. La musique qu’en tire Tomoko Sauvage, calme et méditative, appelant, sans jeu de mot, une forme d’immersion, suscite également le souvenir d’autres expériences. Le balancement régulier de l’eau, le clapotis des gouttes, les résonances légèrement assourdies captées par les hydrophones, se fondent en un paysage sonore à la fois étrange et familier. Il nous replonge dans des situations où notre perception du monde est modifiée, filtrée, par l’élément aquatique. Celles-ci sont parfois prosaïques, mais peuvent être aussi plus profondes. Les titres choisis par la musicienne pour ces morceaux sont ainsi parlant, ils vont du simple « Raindrop Exercise » (« exercice aux gouttes de pluie ») à « Amniotic Life » (« la vie amniotique »). Tomoko Sauvage sera en concert ce samedi 24 avril à la chapelle Saint-Roch en Volière à Liège. L’ASBL Epiphonie, en collaboration avec la Médiathèque de la Communauté française organise ce concert – durant lequel se produira également le saxophoniste John Butcher – à l’occasion de la sortie de la Sélec 10.
Aquarian Hydrophones
Tomoko is now officially supported by Aquarian Audio, her hydrophones' manufacturer. The model she uses is H2a-XLR.
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ASPER#1 NOYADE/ SAUVAGE
dokidoki + udo released an album vinyl ASPER#1.
Side A : NOYADE (Erik Minkkinen + David Lemoine) Side B : Tomoko Sauvage
Both sides are the recordings of the live performances at udo bar in September/ October 2009.
Festival Elektroni[k] with André Gonçalves
A video clip made by POWSKII of the performance in Rennes, 21 October, with André Gonçalves and his resonant objects.
Tomoko Sauvage & Andre Gonçalves @ cultures ELECTRONI[K] from POWSKII on Vimeo.
ELECTROMANIA, France Musique
"Amniotic Life" from the album Ombrophilia was played in Electromania, radio France Musique on 1 Sep.
THE WIRE, May 2009 issue
Momus mentions my music and forthcoming album "Ombrophilia" in his essay for The Wire magazine, May 2009 issue + extracts of 2 tracks from "Ombrophilia" featured on the Wire web.
"......The music I love most right now is a preview of 'Ombrophilia', the debut album by my friend Tomoko Sauvage, due from Seattle label and/OAR later this year. Ombrophilia means 'an abnormal love of rain'. Tomoko uses wooden cooking spoons to strike and stir Chinese porcelain rice bowls filled with water. The wobbly, chiming vessels turn tuned water into a sort of natural synthesizer, complete with organic forms of envelope, modulation, pitchbend and decay. Tomoko captures the gloopy, ringing sonorities with subaquatic mic probes, then feeds the result through digital processing. Track titles like "Amniotic Life" reveal that she's drawn inspiration from the fluid sounds of her recent pregnancy - her own internal 'waters' and the new life moving within them.
This is super-quiet music, filled with something sweeter and sexier than rock's morbid, normative love of pain. When Tomoko plays it live, water dripping from a pierced polythene bag hung from the ceiling not only adds a kind of random percussion, but scatters reflections off the lit water surface across the walls and ceiling. The result is soothing and sensual, like a long hot bath. I could soak in it forever."
Solo album "Ombrophilia" was released in June 2009 from either/OAR , Seattle, USA ->
March 13, Fri ３月１３日（金） JUNKROOM @ urbanguild, 京都, Kyoto, Japan (c/w Charles-Eric Billard, Floating Room, Jana Winderen, Mitsu Salmon + Ryotaro, DJ AFRIphoniCAAAAA
April 10, ４月１０日（金） JUNKROOM @ urbanguild 京都, Kyoto, Japan
April 26, ４月２６日（日）"tide" @ sample white room by sukima industries 奈良, Nara, Japan (c/w MAN - Rasim Biyikli, Yuki Kaneko, musika-nt / omoidemaigo, Shizuka Nakano, 備後英行)
Oct 6
concert solo enregistré au casque, (recorded headphone concert) presented by dokidoki @udo, Paris XIè, France
Oct 21
Festival Electroni[k], Rennes, France
- 12h15 solo @Les Champs Libres
- 20h30 with André Gonçalves @Hôtel de Ville - Salle des Mariages
Oct 26
Q-O2, Brussels, Belgium
c/w Daniel Meyer Gronvold & Havard Volden
Nov 12
gerngesehen, Cologne, Germany
@Praxis-Projekt-Atelier Staab / Eigelstein c/w Jacob Kirkegaard
Nov 13
mex, Dortmund, Germany
c/w Marc Matter, Aki Nakazawa
Nov 14
Pit Noack, Hannover, Germany
Nov 18
staalplaat working space, Berlin, Germany
impro sessions/ installation with Momus and Seiji Morimoto
Nov 27
Hörbar, Hamburg, Germany
Dec 10
Festival CONSTELLATIONS by Kubilai Khan Investigations
18h Maison de la Photographie, Toulon, France
Dec 12
Musée du quai Branly, Paris
salon de lecture - après la séance d'écoute des bols tibétains des collections du musée
* * * *
A scientist's point of view - 'mermaid music...'
Science writer from NY, Lee Kottner wrote about my music and hydrophones with lengthy scientific explanation......
no hyperlinks - original text with links on Cocktail Party Physics
".... Another example of the intersection of electronics and music, and my new obsession, is Tomoko Sauvage's water drip performances. Sauvage first came to my attention through a YouTube video of her performing on waterbowls in Paris (It's kind of a crappy quality video, so I won't embed it; here's a better one of her rehearsal with Scottish pop star Momus). She has a set of graduated-sized porcelain bowls filled with varying amounts of water that she plays like a percussion instrument with a couple of wooden kitchen spoons, accompanied by an electronic drone and drum track or electronic shruti box. Same principle as playing a glass harmonium, harmonica or harp (like the wine glasses in the video above): fill a receptacle with water and make it vibrate. The water acts as an amplifier as well as determining what note the receptacle "plays" by how much liquid you make resonate. The water bowls, Instead of being rubbed to make them resonate (as you also do with Tibetan singing bowls), are struck like a xylophone. The cool thing about this method is that the tone can be varied a little by stirring the water, which adds a vibrato. You can hear and see this in the Momus video I linked to above. The struck bowls have a bell-like tone similar to struck singing bowls, one that's deeper and more resonant than glasses. Don't try this at Thanksgiving with the jello salad bowl.
Where Sauvage's work gets back to the ambient is in her waterdrop performances, like this one:
......
In this case, she's using hydrophones to transmit the sound of water dropping into the bowls and hitting the bowls themselves, the water in the bowls moving, the sounds of her pouring water in, and her disturbing the water and flicking the bowls with her fingers. That kind of plooping sound the water makes pouring into the bowl is due in part to a process called cavitation (the making of a cavity), where air bubbles created by changes in pressure in the water oscillate and explode, creating teeny shock waves. Usually it takes a marked change in pressure for cavitation to occur, but fast-flowing water can do the same thing on a smaller, quieter scale than, say, a submarine or ship propeller. On that louder and larger scale, cavitation can actually erode rock and damage metal. In Sauvage's bowl though, it's more like blowing water through a straw: noisy but harmless. These are normally sounds you wouldn't hear well, if it all, without amplification, and a normal mic wouldn't help much.
Hydrophones were originally developed to collect sounds underwater and transmit them the way land-based mics do, to amplifiers and recording media. This is done with pressure-sensitive transducers "tuned" to the same impedance (how fast sound moves or propagates through a medium) as water, rather than air. Transducers turn the pressure of sound waves into electrical signals that are then decoded by the amplifier. Water is a great acoustic medium because of its density, which gives the sound waves more particles to push around, creating more pressure over the same surface area for the transducers to pick up. Because of this, even faint sounds, like shrimp clicking their little claws to stun fish (remember that shock wave?), can be easily heard underwater with a hydrophone. Sadly, now that we have the tools to hear them, some of those noises and natural songs are being lost in the noise pollution of ship traffic, which is mostly more cavitation noise when it's not sonar or drilling.
Hydrophones are used in a number of different research areas, from studying the aforementioned sea mammal communication and echolocation and estimating their populations and feeding and migration patterns, to hunting subs, studying sound propagation and visualizing sound wave fields (pdf), and monitoring underwater earthquakes and volcanoes. Whitlow W. L. Au, Chief Scientist in the Marine Mammal Research Program at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, University of Hawaii at Manoa, was recently elected President-Elect of the Acoustical Society of America, which gives you some idea of how closely the two fields are intertwined.
But this is the first I've seen hydrophones being used to make music. Is it mermaid music, or music for mermaids?"
radio Lora - brainhall art production
21 Dec 2008, radio show about 'waterbowls' with recordings and interviews on radio Lora, Zurich, Switzerland. mp3 downloadable on brainhall art production website
mizu asobi - performance/ installation with water drops
/ / / / / 'aquatic soundscape in porcelain bowls' with waterdrops, hydrophones, porcelain bowls, electronics
９月６日 @ アブラウリ（定員に限りがあるので要予約 tmk@o-o-o-o.orgまで）
6 Sep_ @ aburauri, Tokyo
９月１４日 @ gift_lab（定員に限りがあるので要予約 gift_labまで）
14 Sep_ @ gift_lab, Tokyo
21 Sep_ mizu.oto. - musique aquatique with Emmanuel Rébus@ La Veilleuse, Paris
27 Sep_ @ alberto ukebana, Berlin (session duo with Rinus van Alebeek)
1 Oct_ solo @ kleine field recording festival -"between natura morta and lanterna magica" part 3 with Seiji Morimoto, Heidrun Schramm, Johe @ Kunstraum Art. Uhr, Berlin
3 Oct_ solo @ gallery la condition japonaise, Berlin
10 Oct _ duo with Emmanuel Rébus @ Labomedia, Orléans, France. extract of ive recording
16 Oct _ duo with Nicolas Lelièvre @ Epsilonia on Radio Libertaire, 89.4Mhz Paris
18 Oct _ duo with Nicolas Lelièvre @ La Générale en Manufacture, Sèvres, France (c/w Nozal Cube, super jean françois plomb, vusion sonic, etc...)
7 Nov _ solo & duo with Fumie Hihara (koto) Festival R-de-Choc @l'Espace Jemmapes, 116 quai Jemmapes, 75010 Paris
21 Dec _ 'waterbowls project' with recordings and interviews @ Radio LoRa, 97.5 MHz, Zurich, Switzerland, presented by brainhall art production
cancelled/annulé
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"apam napat" released on Musica Excentrica
"apam napat", the first album of Tomoko Sauvage (waterbowls) + Gilles Aubry (live sampling) is released from a russian net label, Musica Excentrica.
http://www.excentrica.org/releases/17/
