TAISHI KAMIYA “UBIQUITOUS MUSIC”

HAPPENINGText: Shinichi Ishikawa

It is hard to define music. In the narrow sense, it can be music is what has a scale, a melody and rhythm. However, to define that this is all about music might shut the possibility music has.

Taishi Kamiya is an artist based in Sapporo, doing artistic live performances with computer, and also presiding over an original label “aMiLABEL“. I went to his ongoing solo exhibition. To get the venue, you should take a bus “Kan12 ropeway line” from Maruyama park station at subway “To-Zai line”, and got off at Asahigaoka high school. It takes about 15 minutes. Walking about further 5 minutes from the bus stop, there you can find the venue Gallery Monma. A building a little bit apart from the main building is his exhibition place Gallery Monma ANNEX.

The concept of the exhibition is presenting music exept live performance or CD, an experiment which put into practice Taishi’s thought that music can be produced by changing sounds in time and space. He thinks that if this can be music, nature already involve music, and calls this theory “Ubiquitous Music”. That is to think that if you listen to daily life carefully, music is there.

Inside the venue, rectangular wooden boards are covering long and narrow floor. The each board has red and black thin codes reaching to the ceiling. You can feel comfortable with this quite minimum space. Then, “sound” comes out from somewhere, which is like sound or noise of nature environment.

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