BRATTLEBORO — Japanese sound artist Yosuke Fujita, who performs under the moniker FUJI ¦¦¦¦ TA, will take the stage at the multimedia arts venue Epsilon Spires on Tuesday, June 21.
Supporting him on the bill is id m theft able, a prolific veteran of the noise music scene from Windham, Maine. Funding for this event is provided in part by an Arts and Culture Grant from The Japan Foundation of New York.
In 2009, Fujita hand-fabricated a pipe organ with eleven pipes and no keyboard that has become the central component of his performances.
He based this instrument on the traditional Japanese musical concept of gagaku, a slow and elegant form of classical music found in the 7th century. The organ is air-powered by a mechanism modeled on a blacksmith's bellows. Fujita recently added a water element to his performance, creating music that consists of sounds from multiple aquariums alongside his pipe organ and voice.
“The inventive approach that Fujita has taken to the organ will hopefully encourage our audience to consider the instrument in a new way, with a broader cultural context,” Jamie Mohr, executive director of Epsilon Spires, said in a news release. “Ideally, this will result in increased exploration and experimentation with this traditional instrument, whose potential in contemporary sound art has yet to be fully explored.”
Innovative pipe organ performances have been a hallmark of the programming at Epsilon Spires, which is home to one of the last three-stop Estey pipe organs still in use today.
The organ was designed and manufactured here in Brattleboro, and was installed in the historic former church that houses Epsilon Spires in 1906. A diverse array of practitioners have routinely played the pipe organ at Epsilon Spires for free lunchtime recitals, live silent film soundtracks, and concerts of internationally renowned experimental composers, with each musician breathing new life into this “treasured artifact of Brattleboro's history.”
id m theft able, the solo project of noise musician Scott Spear, will open for Fujita. Since 1999, id m theft able has performed in more than 40 countries and has been featured on more than 100 releases, most of which were self-produced or put out on small underground labels.
In a 2021 review of id m theft able's album, Well I Fell in Love With the Eye at the Bottom of the Well, critic Joe Murray describes his style as “a probing of his own body and environment, where each performance and recording becomes a masterclass in how to push and how to pull; how to end up in a space id m theft able himself and the audience didn't imagine existed.”
Tickets for this event are $20 and can be purchased at epsilonspires.org.