Tim Hodgkinson & Yumi Hara Press / Reviews

  CD album Schema*Sukima reviews

by Harry Gilonis, 30.xi.2022

‘I do not think I have ever encountered improvisation as free from hesitancy’

At the start of their joint performance downstairs at the Laure Genillard Gallery in 2014, during the exhibition schema*sukima held there, two well-established improvising musicians, one English (Tim Hodgkinson) and one Japanese (Yumi Hara) set up their instruments - table-top steel guitar and percussion and keyboards, respectively - facing a largely blank wall.

It was partly occupied by a Kenneth Dingwall’s 2008 RGB II, a gridded array of small, brightly-painted red, yellow and blue MDF panels, set out regularly to display every possible regular permutation of colour and orientation. You might say it was schematic, followed a schema; did everything that could be asked of it. Which it did, within the limits it set itself: a logical presentation of elements, subsumed under a concept, or a set of concepts: pure colour, equidistance, 90-degree angles.

What happened next on that September evening complicated matters somewhat, presenting as it did material that, as it were, was impurely coloured, complicatedly self- and other-intertwined at differing distances, and came at you, as a rule, from an odd angle. This set it more firmly in the second term of the exhibition’s title, sukima: ‘crevice’, ‘crack’, ‘chink (in one’s armour)’. Hara and Hodgkinson began in the ‘intervals’ (sukima) between musical intervals, with the rustling of plastic and the scraping of guitar strings.

Owing to the unusual shape of the Gallery’s downstairs room, the acoustic is reverberant and yet sounds are extraordinarily clear, as is preserved on the commercially[1]issued recording*. From tiny beginnings, sounds which are closer to the gaps between sounds (sukima) become a form or shape (schema), following rules that last as long as their exposition. This all sits very neatly with the Kant cited in the exhibition catalogue**: the imagination is free to schematise without a priori concepts, forming its judgements subjectively. I would be tempted to say that any schemata evolved on that September evening were as indeterminate as the music — but that was very determined. I do not think I have ever encountered improvisation as free from hesitancy, from transitional passages, from what might be ungenerously called ‘muddle’.

Half a minute into the title track on the CD the dropping of a piece of metal is a notable event; within twenty seconds there is a muscular, motorik riff to contend with... which establishes itself, mutates, and becomes extinct, all with no hint that it was an anomaly, a wrong turn, a false start. Sound-objects are allowed to be themselves. This music is object-centred, focussed on the ‘characteristic properties of things’ (Greek schema), and we must learn to deal with, converse with objects on equal terms. Or, to quote a stanza by an English poet working within a Japanese poetic form, that of renga: one bright harebell in flower one person facing another**

For the second half of the performance Yumi and Tim were facing a live audience, and there were sung texts (albeit with improvised accompaniment). At first it seemed a recap, with the crackling of plastic rendered with hallucinatory clarity; but a long, held clarinet note devolved into a continuous trill, and the instant that faltered the voice came in. Yumi sings a Japanese song of her composition, ‘Walk on the Middle of the Road’, which deals in part with the subtly-enforced social conformity which the phrase ‘middle-of-the-road’ embodies. But the song is also known as ‘Lullaby: After the Disaster’, which dichotomy better catches the mood of the words and their rendition here, split between soft high voice and forceful near scream. Hodgkinson’s clarinet spirals round Hara’s voice with astonishing agility.

The remaining pieces both have texts by a musical associate of them both, Chris Cutler. The first is called ‘Latifundia’, the Latin term for large rural estates often worked by slave labour. Oddly, Cutler’s punning text seems to deal more with socially necessary work: “unless we sow, the world will weep”. Sotto voce voice weaves in and out of quiet, breathy, Alban-Bergian clarinet, the latter expanding gloriously and floridly between two repeats of the word ‘flower’... the old dialectic of ‘instant composition’ is here splendidly, for a time, resolved.

The final song, ‘E=mc2’, investigates the thesis that the Serbian physicist and mathematician Mileva Marić had a significant share in the theoretical developments more often solely credited to her husband Albert Einstein. Cutler handles this allusively, depicting the temporal reversibility found at the sub-atomic particle level in more everyday terms: “the tiny cup is now in pieces ... all the pots fly back together”. Stately clarinet sets out a stall, momentarily interrupted by particles of clatter, until Sprechstimme voice comes in. It moves between almost-inaudible words intercut with tongue-click clarinet noises and forceful declamation: “Mileva sings, nobody hears her”. Voice and woodwind work in such registral and timbral closeness that they almost blur, almost meld. Here σχῆμα, ‘form’, ‘shape’ is at one with すきま [sukima], ‘break’, ‘pause’, even, in almost Heideggerean terms, ‘opening, clearance’.

As the Japanese haiku revolutionary Taneda Santōka put it (here with a translation by an English poet): biru to biru no sukima kara miete yama no aosa yo between office-block and office-block a crevice through which the green mountain can appear!

* Hodgkinson / Hara, schema*sukima (Bonobo’s Ark Records, 2017)

** see Kant’s Critique of Judgement, § 35; Connearn cites, and I draw on, the Werner Pluhar translation.

For more on the show, see http://www.lglondon.org/index.php/project/2607---13092014

1 Feb 2019, by Dmitry M. Epstein (LET IT ROCK)

'Triumph of unexpectedness from proponents of chamber music, where mental effort meets happenstance.

As a senior lecturer at at University of East London, Dr. Yumi Hara Cawkwell knows the value of discipline, yet there’s a different aspect of this practice which she applies to her performances, and if album with Geoff Leigh allowed but a sneak peak of such an approach, the concert the avant-garde composer played with another HENRY COW alumnus, Tim Hodgkinson, is a master-class in emotional intangibility – something requiring a lot of discipline from artists and listeners alike. “Playing” must be a keyword here, because that was a game: the musicians sat with their backs to the audience to face a variety of instruments and other objects for the first part of the show and stood up to deliver a stunning aural installation once tension reached its apogee. Expecting any kind of release from the resulting sounds would be a mistake, though.

For all the duo’s supposed spontaneity, the appearance of “E=mc²” – a piece which keeps popping up in Yumi’s on-stage repertoire – and the mesmeric song “Walk In The Middle Of The Road” from "Statement Heels" betray the amount of preparation she and Tim had invested in shaping these pieces; devoid of visuals now, his passionate clarinet and her eerie vocals are the only voices one can connect with, the percussive rest working on an almost subliminal level. “The Offering – R Y B” may combine clang with screech, and scratch with rustle that slivers of ivories try to stitch together, but “The Revealed – The Hidden” has a cinematic fright laid out in synthetic patterns as if to defy the concept of chaos hanging over everything, “The Plot – The Plan” – the alien blues – and the short title track the epitome of deceptively disjointed reality. The existentialism will seem seamless in “Appearance / Disappearance” thanks to the presence of cosmic piano and solemn organ.

Still, it’s the meditative “Latifundia” that’s the foothold of this chamber experiment, a suggestion that there’s more then meets the eye in this collaboration which can never be repeated. Capturing the extended moment, “Schema * Sukima” is an attempt to embrace infinity.

***2/3'

28 Feb 2018, EURO ROCK PRESS vol.76 by Atsushi Asano (Japan)

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