Segaki
Japanese culture has fascinated me since I began to study Karate-do as a teenager and sub-sequently began to learn the language and travel to Japan for work and further study. Kumo, my artist name, is the Japanese word for cloud. Japan has a long rich tradition of horror stories and being largely untouched by Judeo-Christian beliefs has a different set of fears and imagery.
The title comes from a Buddhist ceremony. A Segaki is traditionally performed to stop the suffering of the gaki, ghosts that are tormented by insatiable hunger, sometimes for human flesh. Alternatively, the ceremony forces the gaki to return to their portion of hell, or keeps the spirits of the recently deceased from falling into the realm of the gaki. The Segaki may be performed at any time, but it is traditionally part of O-Bon, a festival held every year in July or August to remember the dead. Summer is the traditional time for remembering the dead and telling ghost stories in Japan - the chilling tales cool the blood on long, hot summer nights.
I wanted to make a musical version of a Segaki - an offering to the dead, almost like a party for the dead. A piece filled with sympathy for their suffering and inviting them to appear.
I first came across the idea of gaki and Segaki in the works of Lafcadio Hearn. He is one of the great documenters of Japanese culture - particularly its darker and more mysterious aspects. For example in his book In Ghostly Japan (1899), he tells the story of The Peony Lantern in which the hero Shinzaburo recognizes the approach of his spectral lover and her hand-maiden by the sound of their Geta (wooden Japanese sandals) on the cobbled pavement.
Another big source of inspiration and material for this piece is Masaki Kobayashi's 1964 film Kwaidan. This eerie masterpiece of Japanese cinema tells 4 ghost stories, 2 of which are sourced directly from Hearn's book of the same name.
The rhythm of the piece is its driving force and foundation. Even a party for the dead needs a strong groove. I based the rhythm on the swingy drumming often used in the O-bon festival. I had recorded some rhythms of this type in Osaka some years ago and used those recordings as a template for the groove I invited my ghosts to dance to.
In the middle section of the piece I wanted to create the sound of ghosts gathering to celebrate. As in The Peony Lantern, Japanese footsteps both male and female have a particular sound. Originally I'd planned to record various friends and family moving around in Japanese clothes, with Japanese footwear and on Japanese surfaces. I was even going to make Geta for my daughter in order to create the characteristic kara-kon, kara-kon sound referred to by Hearn. But as I began to experiment the recordings didn't sound very interesting - they had no patina.
Patina is a very central concept in Japanese culture, as it is one of the many facets of Wabi-Sabi - the Japanese aesthetic, their concept of beauty. It is far too complex an idea to discuss here, but for objects to have true Wabi-Sabi they must display signs of natural processes - use or ageing. The Japanese word for rust is also pronounced Sabi, which although not a translation at least gives an idea to the character of the concept.
Eventually in my search for Wabi-Sabi I had the idea to use material directly from the soundtrack of Kwaidan. The footsteps and sounds of movement in the film are authentically Japanese and are already aged not only by over 40 years of time itself, but by the nature of the film process. This functions not only to bring another aesthetic to the piece but also acts as a homage to one of the great works of cinema.
I built a collage of the sounds of footsteps and movement from Kwaidan which reaches a crescendo as all the souls and gaki gather together.
The last section of the piece is their time - their party, their dance before returning to their rightful homes in Heaven - or Hell.
The piece finishes with one last quote from Kwaidan:
Yume dewanai - it was not a dream.
Film by Mark Video
Choreography by Shaun Boyle
Segaki Preview