Dialogues

The intimate nature of the duo format has resulted in some of improvised music’s most memorable sessions – from John Coltrane / Rashied Ali’s Interstellar Space to John Tilbury / Marcus Schmickler’s Variety. The Empty Gallery is proud to present Dialogues, a special concert featuring improvised performances by two pairs of long-standing musical collaborators: Ko Ishikawa / Joel Ryan and Jean-Luc Guionnet / Daichi Yoshikawa. Our first performance will be a duet between laptop and Sho (Bamboo Mouth Organ) while our second performance will pair amplified saxophone with feedback. Both of these performances explore unconventional groupings of instruments which seem to blend together in the act of listening, evoking a music which sounds at once futuristic and archaic.

Ko Ishikawa is a classically trained Sho (Bamboo Mouth Organ) player who studied under teachers from the Imperial Household in Japan. He is a member of the contemporary Gagaku ensemble Reigakusha as well as the Evan Parker Electro-Acoustic Ensemble. Although musicians trained in the Gagaku tradition have participated in Modern Classical music, Ishikawa-san is one of the only ones to engage with the broader experimental music and free improvisation community.

Joel Ryan could serve as a paradigm of a certain generation of American inventor/composers. Starting with a scientific education, he moved into music by degrees. After enrolling at Mills College in San Francisco and studying with Robert Ashley and David Behrman, he joined the emerging community of artist-hacker-radicals who helped define Silicon Valley. Drawing on his scientific background, he pioneered the application of digital signal processing to acoustic instruments. At STEIM in Amsterdam since 1984, he has collaborated extensively with artists and musicians including Evan Parker, William Forsyth, George Lewis, Steina Vasulka and Jerry Hunt.

Jean-Luc Guionnet is a Paris-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, and artist. His practice divides itself into as many avenues as there arise occasions to “think and act with sound”. He has mostly worked in electro-acoustics but also has a career in free improvisation, playing alto saxophone, soprano saxophone, church organ, and piano. He frequently collaborates with Daichi Yoshikawa, Eric La Casa, Sejiro Murayama, Eric Cordier, Thomas Bonvalet Taku Unami and others.

Daichi Yoshikawa is a musician and cyclist based between Berlin and London. As one of a younger generation of musicians emerging from the fertile scene around Cafe Oto in London, he takes the expanded sonic field of free-improvisation as a starting point for his personal investigations into performed sound. His practice takes the form of working with feedback and objects. Daichi is interested in the spaces we can construct together through the intensities of live performance. His work is the push and pull of extremes: pitch, volume and gesture.