When Jun Azumatei started to use the word “Live Performance”, I couldn’t get the point of it at first. As many exhibitions feature so-called “live events” these days, they mostly seem to be just another sideshow. Over the past two years, Soft-Concrete has performed many times, occasionally featuring one or two guests, and I had a chance to take part in one such performance at the Azumatei Project, in which I live-sculpted with a singer. The impression I had during the live performances, both theirs and mine, was: “Okay, there sure is something to this, after all.” It was not about the sessions or interactions between different personalities but about the action. In other words, it is all about whether something indescribable yet soul-stirring would occur right there and then. (Or not.) Of course, there is nothing new or groundbreaking about it, but I cannot help feeling that it elides something important, a clue for going on living in this time and age. Most of their “Live Performances” over the past two years were conducted with people Jun Azumatei met around the Noge district (especially at bars), and they all seemed to perform and express like they drink and breathe, or at least that was my impression. I suppose that expression has taken root that thoroughly in their lives. Soft-Concrete was formed exactly such an environment. This is the first attempt for them to present the fruits of their creation as an exhibition, with a certain period of time. I’m very much looking forward to seeing what they will present in this different situation, a situation that will soon occur before our very eyes. 

Takuro Ishii (sculptor)

 

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-To remain being Soft-Concrete-

 

Soft-Concrete is a sound and art performance duo formed by artist Jun Azumatei and musician Kota Saito.

 

Azumatei uses ordinary materials that everyone can obtain easily. The way he uses them is unique, however. For instance, he once used plastic bags that many stores in Japan offer to customers for their wet umbrellas as the molds for plaster, the rim part of a megaphone for curing, a curing sheet on wood frame as canvas, etc. I feel that he is provoking the audience to question common sense or the fixed ideas they have in regards to the unusual usage of material.

 

Saito, on the other hand, uses the sound of the guitar he plays and samplings from the fragments he has recorded all over the place. With a cassette tape recorder, he samples small talk at izakayas (typical Japanese taverns), random sounds he got interested in on his trips or everywhere he goes — no, not just that — using the recorder like a camera, he “shoots” the scene as if he engulfs whole surroundings he encounters including sounds, air and views. The sounds that are being played on site and the sounds that has compiled beforehand, those multiple sounds intermingle and get into the audience’s ears as one peculiar soundscape.

 

They have chosen live performance as their main activity from the first, in which the performances of the two would be mixed and intertwined, filling up the space with a tense feeling, with strange objects and sounds fed out constantly. The developments are unpredictable and torrential, and gradually make the audience uneasy. Yet, strangely enough, the result is not obnoxious. We rather find ourselves in the state that we don’t mind whatever the next development will be, and hang on the edges of our seats awaiting what comes next.

 

After their performance, we try to figure out what was going on and look for some reason to accept it, but the conclusion would be unformed. In short, they are and will remain Soft-Concrete, who keep seeking their next interests or subjects, such as place, and will never congeal.

 

Hidetada Karasuyama (painter)

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On a boulevard full of gentle spring sunshine, on a dark alley with a stale odor, in a sunny spot on Sunday balcony, on the side of piled up dust around the corner of a bachelor’s room, there always float melodies and rhythms. And as a poet once proudly proclaimed the five colors for each vowel, even every melody and rhythm too has its own individual color.

 

There are the melodies, which are floating, or rather, once were floating and are going to float. There is also a pulsating rhythm at regular intervals, and you can also feel another that is reverberating and repeating the acceleration and deceleration as it delays little by little. You randomly scoop them, offer them, chop them occasionally, and throw them away casually. The discarded fragments immediately retreat to the corner like snakes crawling, and soon will be forgotten. The player, however, knows that they are still biding their time, silently watching him from their dark nests. So, he plays a requiem for the snakes with melodies out of tune, then suddenly the forgotten passage becomes a memory. In order to share the space where newness and oldness, future and past ought to be neutralized, we need to treat all of them equally. Giving too much meaning is too risky in there.

 

Live performance is the act in which the performer would repeat destruction and creation, just like that. I think that the colors and shapes, the melodies and rhythms in front of us must be the mixture of something you want it to be, and what they actually are. Therefore, locking the eternity and the moments of fear of the void into those transitory states, we, Soft-Concrete will offer you our ideas and gas indiscriminately and shamelessly.

Kota Saito (musician)

 

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As I had been exchanging emails with a Nordic songstress whom I had never met in person, our schedules in Northern Europe were going to be settled favorably. It was in early spring of 2020. I met with Kota Saito at a small bar on the alley behind Azumatei Project to talk about the touring plan as a performance unit in Japan and Northern Europe. Soft-Concrete was born when the name was put on the label of a bottle we ordered. Soon after Easter that year, I received an email from the songstress, in which she gave a detailed explanation about the risks of the carbon dioxide emissions from the flights between Northern Europe and the Far East. That was when our plan for the newborn Soft-Concrete’s “debut in Northern Europe” ended in an anticlimax.

 

Ooka River (grand hill river), a.k.a Dobu-Gawa (filth river), is a brackish waterway that runs eastward and empties into the sea of the upscale Minato-mirai bay area. The water of Dobu-Gawa recently seems clearer than it used to be, and if the timing is right, you can see black porgies and sea basses gently swimming upstream from Tokyo Bay. I presume it owes to the drainage regulations for households and factories, or the technology development of the sewage treatment around here. We spend our days in a town spreading on the banks of the river. There will always be revolting events everywhere at any time day or night that make us want to turn our eyes away. Converting them into the average ugliness, we just let them go past and spit into the dirty river. People use words like “beautiful”, “cute” or “pretty” too easily. I guess that is because those words are just convenient to capture the feelings — feelings that truly “ugly” people contrived. In a sense, it might be said that in a society maintaining the ordinariness fabricated by foulnesses, we are acting as the default system setting demands, enduring ugly errors we generate everyday and slowly turning our back on our own thoughts. Now, what kind of expressions could we give to the shapes of the fishes that we saw through the shining and weaving surface of Dobu-Gawa?

 

A year and a half has already passed since the last email from the songstress. Due to the restrictions on movement in the coronavirus outbreak, the carbon dioxide emissions have been reduced dramatically and the continued existence of the airline companies are being threatened. On the other hand, it seems that the recoveries of contaminated nature are being reported worldwide. I am not trying to say that it is as the songstress predicted, but I must admit that creation dwells exclusively in the strictness of people who think, decide and act. 

Jun Azumatei (contemporary artist)

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