ESSAY by Machida, Global Ear: Skopje+Bitola :
THE WIRE issue246 Aug, 2004

Global Ear: Skopje + Bitola:
A survey of sounds from around the planet.
This month: Improvising musician Yoshio Machida reports on recent collabolative capers in Macedonia

Macedonia produces a delicious wine called T'ga Za Jug, which translates as "Yearning for the south". Its name is taken from a famous poem by Macedonian poet Konstantin Miladinov, who was writing about missing the abundant sunshine of his homeland during a stay in Russia. A great deal of Macedonian culture is influenced by the sun - as is Japan, whose original name Nippon means "Origin of the sun".

This summer, Bitola's centre for contemporary public arts called Elementi and the Japanese organisation Colavo Collavoration launched an exhibition of contemporary art entitled Collaboration, the first stage of an ongoing Japan-Macedonia exchange programme. The event took place in Skopje and Bitola, with the second stage set to follow this autumn in Japan. The main purpose of the event was to encourage visual artists and experimental/improvising musicians to reconsider the whole notion of collaboration.

Forging creative partnerships might come naturally to music makers - even those meeting for the first time - but fine art tends to remain a more solitary practice. So the works in Collaboration allowed viewers to compare approaches in each discipline and judge whether the joint efforts had actually helped to push back the limits of expression.

The music events were held at Bitola's Mosque City Gallery (located, as the name suggests, in a former mosque) and at Tocka, a modern and well organized alternative gallery space in the capital Skopje. Here as in most other cities, the conventional musical menu consists of a diet of HipHop, R&B and rock. But occasionally, and in the old city of Bitola especially, you could pick out the strains of more traditional music, for example in a taxi, in a market, or on TV. This music has unusual, complex rhythmic structures - 4/7 or 4/11 are not uncommon - which, to ears attuned to contemporary electronica, seems to place them closer to cut-up beats and glitch rather than contemporary pop pulses. Essentially, in every sequence the accent falls on the end of the beats, causing a pattern that sounds like regular stumbling. When you dance to this rhythm, it's more crucial to be able to hit that final accent with everyone else rather than to holding down the goove on every beat. I felt this musical approach summed up the way the Macedonians organised the event as whole. Decision making tended to occur in the moment, rather than in the preparation.

The music participants included Macedonians Oliver Josifovski and Foltin, with Japanese artists Keiichi Sugimoto, Tetsuro Yasunaga, Atsuhiro Ito and myself. Josifovski is a multimedia improvisor and a composer of theatre music who originally studied music in Sofia, Bulgaria. He plays the double bass with contact microphones; bowing strings and beating the body of the instrument, he controls samples with trigger effects. He also plays his original sound system using glass. But unfortunately he was denied permission to play it on this occasion by the Ministry of Culture, which bizarrely, is required. Foltin are an ethno-jazz group. Their predominant soundscape is actually Macedonian, but with some jazz inflections, and with a little tango essence of Astor Piazzolla. The vocalist Branislav Nikolov sometimes sings in a non-specific language. You can hear their peculiar brand of Fourth (or is it Fifth?). World music on their album Donky Hot, released on local label Kukuzel Music.

Sugimoto and Yasunaga are both members of the electroacoustic group Minamo, but here they played solo and in newly formed partnerships. Sugimoto utilised guitar and laptop. His solo activity is as known as Fourcolor, under which name he has just released a solo album on Apestaartje. Extremely delicate guitar loops on long delays drift in a flow of electronics. Yasunaga played laptop and electronics. In Minamo, you could say, he produces water for the other players to swim around in, but in this solo display he produced a vivid sound texture of knitting that was almost tactile enough to touch. Ito, promoter of Tokyo's Off Site venue, played his own instrument, the Optron, using fluorescent lights and electronics. Unfortunately his own 100V lights were confiscated at the airport before the performance, so he bought a 220V bulb in Skopje to make a completely new version. He used the instrment, which looks like sword, to produce light flickers and killer noise in a mosque. I played my new Steelpan, which I call the Amorphone #3 (the name incorporates the words amorphous and phone), morphed with Max/MSP processing. The construction of sound is like Indian sitar music, which has strings for resonance. I play simple patterns or melodies with Steelpan and MSP software, which produces light drone part from the processing Steeelpan sound. My two previous Amorphones sounded more like gongs with special scales, but #3's characteristic is a very long sustain, with a clear and bright sound, although the size is smaller than regular one.

We each played a solo, then Josifovski, Sugimoto, Yasunaga, Ito and I played as an ensemble. Japanese artists were not familiar with Josifovski's sound in advance, and vice versa. During the soundcheck, we discussed how the ensemble could work. Josifovski asamantly wanted to play without any rehearsals together, a strategy that proved successful. Foltin play compositions, so they did not collaborate with the other musicians, although they did work together on an installation with two Japanese visual artists, cab & Isamu Joseph Yamazoe, who decorated the surface of islamic columns with some sweets and candles, so it looked like a birthday cake. Nikolov & cab set the candles alight and then the music was started. The Macedonians' sound was strong and feisty, while the Japanese one was generally more delicate (although Ito likes to play loud). So you could say the mixture was like oil and water, but once we played together in the liquid called improvisation, another liquid was created which gave all of us, with our various cultural backgrounds, different perspectives.

The best wines are produced by being grown in a climate where there is a big difference in temperatures between night and day. And of course, strong sunshine is also necessary. Sometimes this extreme climate cannot easily support human life. But on the other hand, it could be said that such hard, it could be said that such hard environment provides the possibility of producing very special and charming things.
(Colavo Collaboration) http://www.amorfon.com/colavo
(Elementi) http://www.cac.org.mk/elementi/about.htm