“An aria of sorcery, set loose.” — from notes on The Aquarium Vanished by Nobuo Ikemiya.
When searching for a phrase that can explain or inform just what Fusae Uchida accomplished with 消えた水族館～内田房江ヴォイスリウム’92 (The Aquarium Vanished: Fusae Uchida Voicerium ’92), I can’t help but pluck this phrase from the original liner notes. In the end, behind whatever biography or process one can dig up, nothing can escape the fact that every bit of this record sounds like Fusae’s voice “leaving her hands,” “walking on its own,” as she’d share.
Following the trail of Fusae Uchida’s life feels like taking a stroll through the cultural map of a Tokyo that has since been demolished or reimagined.
After graduating from the vocal department of Tokyo University of the Arts, Fusae’s immersion in the world of contemporary music led her to perform or appear in a myriad of Japan’s early experimental art and dance spaces. In 1984 she gave a vocal performance at an exhibition by light artist Takuro Osaka at the original Maki Gallery (a haven for avant-garde works of art). That December she performed Matsudaira Yoriaki’s theater piece “What’s Next” at Ikebukuro’s Seibu Museum of Art (later the Sezon Museum of Art), a visionary space housed within a huge Seibu department store that showcased contemporary art and music.
Shortly thereafter Fusae would premiere collaborations at the impressive Striped House Museum in Roppongi and give the Japan premiere of Rzewski’s “Mary’s Dream” in “Music Today,” produced by Takemitsu Toru at the Seibu Theater (now the PARCO Theater). From 1989, three times a year, the ten o’clock late slot at Shibuya’s Jean-Jean hosted Fusae’s “Solo Voice” series, including 1990’s “In the Underground Amusement Park,” in the same church-basement theater on Koen-dori where Miwa Akihiro sang and where actor Nakamura Nobuo did the same one-man play for decades.
The chronology of work Fusae performed before the release of 1992’s The Aquarium Vanished reads like that of an artist carving her space within a milieu of so many vanguardisms that one could get lost in her CV, if it weren’t for this statement piece. Listening to her only known recording puts you in a different place. Her music is warm, curious, and inviting. Far from being a cerebral think-piece, the album sounds like, and was, the product of a playground experiment, leading others to see something in her dream.
Message (Fusae Uchida):
Most of the pieces collected here are patchworks of my own voice, made on a Macintosh (Mac) system. Apart from the lute sound that appears near the end, everything is my voice. Around May of last year, as I rearranged and joined together the waveforms of my voice that I’d loaded onto the Mac’s hard disk, something like pieces of music emerged almost of their own accord, and I became completely hooked on the fun of it — like painting pictures with sound. Shut away in my room for a while, they grew to a certain coherent length, and I began to want someone to hear them. Because every sound was handmade in my own room, in terms of audio quality all the noise and so on has been sampled along with everything else; there may be some passages that are hard on the ears, and I ask your forgiveness.
This year, I decided to make it a CD for the event at the Striped House Museum, and played it for the dance-maker Ikemiya Nobuo. Through his soaring imagination it was given the title The Aquarium Vanished; the pieces were grouped a few at a time and given suggestive names, and my voice-patchwork left my hands. It began walking on its own, toward the image of a literal “house of aquatic creatures” where iguanas, cod and mermaids play leading roles. And Yamashita Kayoko’s colorful, lovable cover art gave the pieces powerful support. …And so my voice-patchwork was able to see the light of day. Ikemiya-san, Yamashita-san — truly, thank you.
Thanks also to sound engineer Okubo Shigeru; Iwasaki Makoto of the Geidai acoustics laboratory; Watanabe Hirotaka of Tail Music; Iwasaki Tetsuya; designer Saegusa Yasuyuki; Kono Takako, who translated the profile into English; Abe Kazuya, owner of the Mac; and Watanabe Hirotaka, the true owner of the Audiomedia — I am greatly indebted to you. My heartfelt gratitude. Thank you all.
Fashioning her voice as art, Fusae “tried to create a situation in which music-as-picture is born: not music to be shown, but music that comes into view.” Using what was off-the-shelf but cutting-edge bedroom production gear, stuff like an Apple Macintosh II, Digidesign’s Audiomedia soundcard and DECK software (a precursor to Pro Tools), and Yamaha SPX90, Korg SDD-1000, and Boss SE-50 rack effects, Fusae spliced her voice together on her personal computer into demos that would only reveal their shape later on.
The experiments started to gain their structure when dance-maker Ikemiya Nobuo listened to early versions of the music and heard a “house of aquatic creatures,” conceiving titles, a track sequence, and a home where those songs could be heard within a story you can find in the original liner notes. “The demo tape had 14 pieces on side A and 6 on side B, 20 in all, with notes on the ideas behind them: ‘Banquet of the Fishes,’ ‘From Tomorrow,’ ‘My Star Having Changed,’ and so on. The notes were a big hint,” Ikemiya wrote.
It was at the Striped House Museum from May 20-28 that an event dubbed “Voicerium ’92” featured Fusae performing these otherworldly arias with and within her own voice, alongside her computer music. Fusae once wrote of Luciano Berio’s Sequenza III that she wished to perform it all her life. In her own music and performances, one was supposed to hear that examination of voice taken to another space, using digital tools to transport you outside herself.
As I put on my critical ear, it leads me to the work of others like Ghédalia Tazartès, whose own solo works spliced his voice to create imaginary folklore. English composer Trevor Wishart squeezed and prodded out of voices mutations that skirt the line of reality. I could sense how Fusae’s ideas belong in the same pantheon as Anna Homler and Steve Moshier’s Breadwoman, Meredith Monk’s Turtle Dreams, Shelley Hirsch and David Weinstein’s Haiku Lingo (especially its playful meeting of samplers and voice), and Robert Ashley’s Private Parts. The throughline connecting Fusae to her technically most like-minded kin, Charles Dodge’s Synthesized Voices, can be judged not in musical terms but in terms of physical computing space. The passage of time had allowed someone like Fusae to set aside the limitations of technology and feel more comfortable with it in the space she chose to create in. And like many of us, it’s at home.
Yet, as I latch onto the dream of songs like “ミステリー” (“Nymph’s Mysterious Language”) or “舞いあがるアリア” (“The Arias, Flying High”), I think Fusae’s closest musical kin is Laurie Anderson, another artist who wants to expose our inherent closeness with what we think is “foreign” or “difficult.”
It’s the old cliche: what we have on our phones right now eclipses what was available to musicians like Fusae. Nowadays, you can easily create infinite versions of this kind of music with countless software. However, the big thing missing is the “big science” Fusae effortlessly tapped into. We’re all increasingly falling into the patterns of others, fed by a constant stream of social media and algorithmic recommendations. To feel comfortable, I think, we need to feel uncomfortable with the state of things, to go down the rabbit hole of our own making and see what pops out. One William S. Burroughs once cut-up his words to match his real vision.
Although Fusae’s biographical trail seems to stop entirely in 1992, her aspirations were predictive, and it’s a marvel to realize what she landed on with what remain still very young digital tools. And if I’m struggling to find words to explain Fusae’s music, it’s because I feel we’re still woefully behind its phrasing. The future has always been with us.
