Melange Editions CD

Not silence, exactly. Or, at least, not just silence. Silence and its opposite. Or, more accurately, an absence, a pause between actions. Not cause and effect but a moment, like a beach that bears the imprint of a walker who has just passed, but which is also, somehow, contains the seeds of what it will become.

For senu hima, Ryoko Akama asked four composers – Jürg Frey, Antoine Beuger, Sarah Hughes and James Saunders, to send her scores, for which she could create a response. Her vision for the album was to use those pieces to explore the idea of senu-hima, a concept from classical Japanese Noh theatre that denotes an interval of silence between actions. But her first response on receiving the scores was one of bafflement. “I was given scores that requested me to ‘perform’ actively with sequences, numbers and certain rules. It was a…