Composer Clay Gold on NaoKo TakaHashi

"TakaHashi's distorted, deconstructed soundwashes, films and words, work upon the whole body, surprising the observer..."

I shone my light about the British Music Collection and found NaoKo TakaHashi, a performance artist in sound and language. Her distorted, deconstructed soundwashes, films and words, work upon the whole body, surprising the observer with analogue repetitions, unexpected twists and chance evolutions. 'Distorted Soundscape' is as much about gesture as it is about immutability. And 'What is it we are going to see?' is beautiful and frightening; intoxicating: beginning as it does with feathers and ending as it does with what looks like vomit but could easily be eggs and paint.

Her list of reference points are as synaesthetic: Meredith Monk, Georges Perec, The Matrix... and this I like, because language is not just audible and visible, all information is operating upon us simultaneously, in a whirl around us.

It has the kind of composition which, in heavier hands, might try too hard to be edgy or disturbing, but at the touch of TakaHashi it doesn't; it burns a little, as though scanning you. It's as if the work is sensing you as much as you are it.

 

Clay Gold, March 2016