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Brief mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:
▰ This is my favorite of some of the recent pieces that guitarist Simon Farintosh has posted, maybe because it feels especially close to the original in tone, like the pace of the source material and the size of the room in which it was captured. Farintosh is best known for his transcriptions for classical guitar of Aphex Twin’s music (about which I’ve interviewed him). Here he does “The Frail” from Nine Inch Nails.
▰ Gorgeous trio, featuring frequent Disquiet Junto participant De Vis with bassist Roy Mastega and a horn player I’ve yet to identify. It’s somewhere between a slowed down “Love Supreme” and an especially stripped down Jon Hassell.
▰ And I’ve been spending a lot of time with some other albums I’ve mentioned recently, notably Years of Ambiguity from keyboardist Kjetil Husebø, supported by Eivind Aarset and Arve Henriksen, and Travel from the Necks.
From San Francisco, California (and Japan): embracing contradictions, reading to compose
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
This Junto Profile is part of a new series of short Q&As that provide some background on various individuals who participate regularly in the online Disquiet Junto music community.
What’s Your Name? Kei Terauchi Sideboard
Where Are You Located? I currently live in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco, California. I was born in Chiba, Japan, and grew up in Tokyo and Saitama, playing the piano, in the 1980s. I suppose I was gifted but I wasn’t a very good student. I refused to learn to read music for years and really did not like practicing. My family moved to Edina, Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis, in 1991 for my father’s work. There my piano lessons felt less confined, but I still played the classical canon of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, etc. I studied French literature and music at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. My senior thesis for French was on the retelling of Tristan and Isolde in literature and — you know it — Wagner, and my music project/presentation was talking about and performing pieces from the Second Viennese School, Berg’s Sonata Op. 1 (which is honestly more Romantic than Second Viennese), and Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces Op. 19.
I went to SUNY Stony Brook and got an MA in Music Theory/History with a focus in music and technology. My master’s thesis was on Der Lindberghflug by Weill and Hindemith. I guess music in academia in my time was very Germanic! To support myself financially I worked as a bartender in NYC and got sucked into the restaurant world. This derailed me from the trajectory of waiting for a tenured professor to pass to finally land a faculty job in a university music department. I worked in some very nice restaurants in NYC, Kyoto, Japan, Minneapolis, Napa Valley, and SF, for 17 years, until I fell into the start-up philanthropy work I’m currently in.
What Is Your Musical Activity? Since I left academia I always played the piano and jokingly called it my party trick. Honestly I wasn’t very inspired for a number of years. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the racial uprisings — the murder of George Floyd and anti-Asian hate crimes in particular — made me rethink about the limitation of playing the classical repertoire, dead white men’s music, on the piano. At this time I had also started an MA program in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University and as I learned to think more critically about the world I decided to push the realm of critical thinking into creativity. This is how I started to make my own music based on my own experience for the first time. I start with conceptualization, then make that into music. The “style” of my music varies quite a bit because I borrow various musical techniques to make what I’ve conceptualized, but I think I have my own recognizable sound. My master’s thesis is about my compositional process accompanied by a dozen pieces I had written during my first and second years in the program. Some Junto projects I have participated in overlap with these.
Kei Terauchi Sideboard reflects on both sides of the Pacific
What Is One Good Musical Habit? 1. Go to performances, see other musicians play music, hear what they do and how they do it. 2. Reading works by authors who figured out how to tell their story their own way helped my music making. Some writers I admire are Alexander Chee, Ocean Vuong, Joan Didion, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, James Baldwin, and Natalia Ginzburg.
What Was a Particularly Meaningful Junto Project?0551: The Bends (“Get less strict about something you’re strict about”) helped me get over my fear of composing on/for the piano!
0544: Feedback Loop was also really nice in that it encouraged participants to interact with each other through close listening and commenting.
When you make music now, would you say you find yourself “unlearning” your earlier classical knowledge, or building upon it? I don’t think I can unlearn my earlier musical knowledge. For one, that would mean erasing the muscle memory from years of piano playing. I avoided using the piano for my composition for a while but there is something physical about piano playing that I need in my life. So I began to write on the piano last summer in a way that makes sense to me. I also think unlearning tonal harmony, the language of classical Western music, is really difficult because it’s everywhere in our culture.
I think of my earlier musical knowledge like language or food you grew up with. Even if it wasn’t your choice, even if you grew up with it because of oppressive circumstances, and even if you hated it at some point in your life, cultural items like language, food, and music, you can come to accept it’s folded in your DNA. You have language or food or music to connect with others around you. So even if a musical tradition was shoved down your throat, when you strip it down to just sound, I think you can let that be, and embrace it, embrace the contradiction within yourself. I think it’s that visceral, at least for me, and that’s how I look at my musical background.
The writers I mentioned earlier showed me that you can have complexity and not have to explain everything in your work. For example, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s book Dictée is a really powerful work of art that shows that the process of creating is how, when and where we express. And she gives zero f’s if you understand what she’s talking about or not. Her writing is engrossed in the act of writing itself and I want my music making to be like that, using my own experience and sounds in my memory, the good ones and the bad ones, because they are both mine. That’s an homage to Ocean Vuong; in his On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous there’s this line, “The thing is, I don’t want my sadness to be othered from me just as I don’t want my happiness to be othered. They’re both mine. I made them, dammit.” Making music lets me hold my contradictions, lets me be me.
▰ Here is pianist Hania Rani performing, live, some of the music from her beautiful score to the film The Giacomettis, which I mentioned earlier this month. The footage was shot at Atelier in Stampa, Switzerland. That’s a former barn Giovanni Giacometti, father of artists Alberto and Diego Giacometti and architect Bruno Giacometti, in 1906 turned into the family studio. Listening to this solo concert while alone at home is a highly recommended. Headphones are great, but better yet, play it loud and transport the sonics of the Atelier into your own room.
▰ The title to René Margraff’s “Hiccup” may be the result of sorting out a playful alternate word for the light glitch the musician brings to this otherwise plaintive, subdued drone. It’s a magnetic piece, just drawing the ear in even as it risks disturbing the very trance it insinuates.
Hania Rani’s On Giacometti contains material from her score to a new film about the artist Alberto Giacometti and Giacometti’s broader family. It’s a gorgeous collection of quiet, contemplative music — the sort of music that fills the space in a film and yet is, through the strange received logic of film-making, intended to signify the presence of silence, the absence of sound. Start with “Knots,” in which a stoic piano part — the score is essentially all piano all the time — gets lightly embroidered with bits of synthesized filigree. Then try “Storm,” which is only stormy at a distance; to listen to its echoing patterning is to witness, purposefully, something through thick glass and grim darkness that is transpiring quite far away. One highlight is the occasional appearance of Dobrawa Czocher’s cello, notably on the opening track. Some of this material will draw comparisons to Nils Frahm (the muffled pads of “Mountains,” for example) and Philip Glass, but this is Rani’s music through and through: the gracious pacing, the lithe development, the ambiguous mood. The movie, The Giacomettis, was directed by Susanna Fanzun.
I’m getting back in the habit of posting brief mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:
▰ It’s hard not to think about death when listening to the new Ryuichi Sakamoto album, 12, since the Japanese legend has been fighting Stage 4 cancer, and his recent livestream has been described as potentially his last concert. In addition, earlier this month his fellow co-founder of Yellow Magic Orchestra, Yukihiro Takahashi, died at age 70 (Sakamoto is a year older). It’s a gorgeous album, and a somber one, as well, with echoes of Erik Satie, Angelo Badalamenti, and even William Basinski, thanks to frequent elements of glacial soundscapes, notably on the opening cut. Sakamoto has at least one more release due out this year, his score for the film Monster, directed by Hirokazu Koreeda (whose Shoplifters was scored by the third co-founder of YMO, Haruomi Hosono).
▰ The first track to appear from the upcoming collaborative album, Images of One, by Tristan Kasten-Krause (double bass) and Jessica Pavone (viola) is the record’s final of four, “On Axis.” Despite the instrumentation’s broad range in timbre and audio spectrum, it becomes admirably difficult to tell where one part ends and the next begins, so simpatico is their exploration of such contemporary classical modes as stillness, atonality, and silence.
