December 16, 2018 | 5PM

Empty Gallery is pleased to invite you to a special year-end performance featuring Tokyo-based experimental musicians Taku Sugimoto and Minami Saeki. Collaborating since 2016, this unlikely pair have together crafted a repertory of spare and abbreviated pop songs which feel resolutely of our moment. Arriving at a kind of effortless vernacular music after a long detour through Cage and the Wandelweiser group, Sugimoto and Saeki’s music is beautifully porous, interweaving silence and environmental sound seamlessly with subdued vocal and instrumental gestures. Minimalist and yet deeply affecting, their practice displays a confidence and generosity towards the listener rare in the world of experimental music.

Taku Sugimoto is a Tokyo-based composer, organizer, and multi-instrumentalist. Active in various music projects since the mid-1980s, Sugimoto first came to notoriety through his singular style of fragile and obliquely melodic improvised guitar playing on albums such as Myshkin Musicu (1996) and Opposites (1998). Along with fellow musicians such as Tetuzi Akiyama and Otomo Yoshihide, Sugimoto was instrumental in defining the so-called “Onkyo” aesthetic of restrained low-volume improvisation through his participation in the seminal music-space Off Site. In recent years, he has focused his efforts on refining and extending his unique aesthetic into the domain of composition.

Minami Saeki is a Tokyo-based actress and musician. After studying classical ballet, classical vocal music, contemporary dance, and other subjects she became active as a performer. She has acted in acclaimed independent films such as Village On The Village (2016) and Uron Na Tokoro (2017). As a singer, she has collaborated with artists such as Taku Sugimoto, Wakana Ikeda, Manfred Werder, Stefan Thut, and others in the fields of both experimental and popular music.