catalog number: either/8
artist: AKIO SUZUKI
title: Dancing Cat
format: CD
status: sold out

Akio Suzuki: Analapos (standing-type and voice-type), De
Koolmees (Suzuki-type glass harmonica), brass plate, glass plate
and bamboo reed (on track 7, which is uncredited in the liner
notes).

Recorded at Ichinomiya City Memorial Art Museum of Setsuko
Migishi, July 12, 2008 by Kiyoharu Kuwayama.

This is a limited edition of 150 copies.

Special thanks to the following people for making this release
possible: Kiyoharu Kuwayama, Faizal Hirji, Brian Lavelle, Sean
O'Brien, HK Kahng, Nancy Novotny, Michael Quinn, Laurent
Wermenlinger, Christopher DeLaurenti, Robert Szkolnicki,
Jonathon Brown, Gary Simmons, James Zachary, Craig Colorusso,
Hideo Makihara and everyone else who generously contributed to
the fund raising campaign for this release via Kickstarter. The
other contributors names can be found at the bottom of the
and/OAR News page and archived at the Kickstarter campaign
web page..


Akio Suzuki is known as a pioneer of sound art, but the breadth
of his activities and the form of his works far exceeds the normal
boundaries of sound art. It is perhaps more as a "quester after
sound and space" that he has received the most attention from
artists in many fields. Suzuki's journey as an artist began in 1963
with a performance at Nagoya station in Japan, in which he threw
a bucket full of junk down a staircase. The inspiration behind this
performance was the idea that if one were to hurl an object down
a well-balanced stairway, a pleasant rhythm might be the result.
Since that time, a playful yet deep desire to not only hear, but
truly listen has remained the one constant in Suzuki's approach
as a sound artist.

During the sixties, Suzuki's sense of playfulness led him to
undertake a series of Self-Study Events, where he explored the
processes of "throwing" and "following", taking the natural world
as his collaborator. The experiences he gained in these events
led him in the seventies to invent an echo instrument he named
Analapos. The instrument's structure resembles that of two
mirrors facing each other, reflecting into infinity. As an extension
of the principles underlying Analapos, Suzuki constructed the
Hinatabokko No Kukan (Space In The Sun) in 1988. This space
consists of two huge parallel walls, in between which the artist
can sit all day and purify his hearing by listening to the reflected
sounds of nature. This space leads the artist to discover a new
method of listening. Suzuki himself comments, "Sound, which had
been conceptually imprisoned in various spaces, is freed to circle
the world."

From the late seventies and through the eighties, Suzuki also
developed a form of performance he refers to as Conceptual
Soundwork. Applying a number of self-imposed, simple and
austere rules, he uses objects close at hand in a mode of
"intellectual play". While these events do on the one hand
express a critique of meaningless improvised performance, at the
same time Suzuki is constantly aware of the audience's process of
listening and he attempts to create contemporaneous
connections with the site of performance. It was around this time
that Suzuki began to travel frequently to the US and Europe, and
his performances at leading music festivals, Festival d'Automne
(Paris, 1978) and Documenta 8 (Kassel, 1987) were rapturously
received.

As sound art enjoyed a period of prosperity in the nineties, Suzuki
was given the chance to create many installations, particularly in
Berlin. Worthy of special note were his soundless installations,
such as Otodate (Echo point, 1996) in Berlin, Enghien-les-Bains
(since 1997, http://www.insitu-enghien.org/) and Strasbourg;
Hana (Flower, 1997) at the Stadtgalarie Saarbrucken; and
Pyramid (1999) which involved people excavating sounds. These
soundless pieces were not designed to critique the old perceptual
theories of music, rather they questioned the very location of
music. Through their encounter with these works, the past
experiences and memories of viewers were reconstructed as new
experiences. This process was fundamental to the action of
"listening" to the works.

In recent years, the insights he gained from the Turbridge
(1999-2000) installation at the Daad Gallery in Berlin have
opened up new avenues of development for his future work. By
recording and creating sound sources himself, and by using
electric amplification with Suzuki's own self-designed output
devices, he was able to reconstruct sounds and experiment with
listening to the "factors of place". These experiments were
followed up by the sound-drawing Mowe (Seagull, 2002) for the
Berlin radio station SFB, and Nagekake & Tadori (Throwing and
Following, 2002) which included some suggestions towards the
construction of place. Visitors to the latter were able to
experience a "place established by the artist as a wholly different
space and time axis."

To run simultaneously with these experiments, Suzuki has started
the Mogari series since 2002 at the Brunei Gallery at the School of
Oriental & African Studies in London. This series centres around
unbelievably powerful performances on iwabue - ancient and
naturally-sculpted stone flutes which have been handed down in
Suzuki's family. Using these ancient instruments Suzuki sculpts
time and place, and through their music he searches for his own
end.