Monday, November 25, 2013

"Some of That Jazz" by Charles Mudede

P A U L K I K U C H I - D R U M S O L O from James Reeves on Vimeo.

"Paul Kikuchi's Bat of No Bird Island"
If you enter the ever-expanding universe of YouTube, you will find an enchanting video of Paul Kikuchi, a Seattle-based percussionist, composer, and sound artist, performing a drum solo in and around the Satsop nuclear power plant, a massive structure that became the ruins of the nuclear age before it was even completed (a quarter of it was never realized, as the whole project came to an end in 1983 after millions upon millions of dollars were wasted). Kikuchi plays his ghostly music—which in some ways recalls Toru Takemitsu's soundtrack for the 1960s art house horror movie Kwaidan (but Kikuchi is much less brutal and nightmarish)—in the ghostly nuclear plant. And because his music is somewhere between natural and deliberate, between wind chimes and the strict order of a composition, we get the sense of the ghost's predicament, which is to be in between being and not being."
Mudede, Charles. "Some of That Jazz." Stranger. 11 Sep 2013: 53. Print. .