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Simon Torssell Lerin/ Bettina Hvidevold Hystad Simon Torssell Lerin / Bettina Hvidevold Hystad with Damo Suzuki Art in the Public Realm - Konstfack 2013

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Simon Torssell Lerin/ Bettina Hvidevold Hystad Simon Torssell Lerin / Bettina Hvidevold Hystad with Damo Suzuki Art in the Public Realm - Konstfack 2013 Simon Torssell Lerin/ Bettina Hvidevold Hystad Simon Torssell Lerin / Bettina Hvidevold Hystad with Damo Suzuki Art in the Public Realm - Konstfack 2013 Simon Torssell Lerin / Bettina Hvidevold Hystad with Damo Suzuki - Live at Fylkingen 2013 1 Introduction and Brief Description of the Project Simon Torssell Lerin / Bettina Hvidevold Hystad with Damo Suzuki explores various methods of art production. An important mode of enquiry is collaboration with other artists. For this project Lerin / Hystad have undertaken a cultural pilgrimage1 in the footsteps of Japanese musician and traveller Kenji “Damo” Suzuki in order to explore ideas about storytelling, improvisation and chance. Lerin / Hystad works interdisciplinary, Hystad has a background in fine arts and Lerin has a background in both fine arts and music. Suzuki is today active with his music project Damo Suzuki´s Network2, a project where he travels around the world and plays improvised concerts together with local bands and musicians. Damo Suzuki´s Network has been active since the early 1990´s and comprises over 5000 musicians. Suzuki calls what he is doing “instant composing”3, most of the times he has not met the other musicians before they go on stage together. He says his concerts are about creating time and space in the moment, a way to communicate through music. Lerin / Hystad´s interest in the concepts behind Suzuki´s music grew from the resemblance they felt it had with their own methods and concepts of working with art. They sent Suzuki an email expressing their interest in his project and he invited them to come and see one of his concerts in Osaka. When meeting him after the concert they found out that he had left Japan as a teenager in the late 1960´s to travel in Europe. By placing a classified advertisement in the Swedish newspaper Expressen he ended up in the village Gräsmark in Värmland, just a few miles from where Lerin grew up 20 years later. Lerin / Hystad became fascinated by Suzuki´s story and decided to make their own journey in order to find out more about his time in Sweden, how he was accepted as a young Japanese traveller in Europe in the late 1960´s, how he became a member in the German krautrock4 band Can5 and his current project Damo Suzuki´s Network. By appropriating the same method Suzuki had used 40 years before the duo placed an article6 in the local newspaper Värmlands Folkblad in order to find someone who might remember something from his time in Gräsmark during the late 1960´s. The same evening as the article was published they heard from Birgitta Engman, a local hairdresser from Gräsmark. She told them about how she was a teenager when Suzuki came to Gräsmark and how they became close friends. Lerin / Hystad travelled to Gräsmark to interview Engman. When they entered her kitchen the table was covered with old photographs, articles, and letters written by Suzuki in early 1970´s. A week later they returned to interview her again, they brought a journalist from Värmlands Folkblad and the story was made public7. A few weeks later the duo received an email from Suzuki saying that maybe their project had made him nostalgic and that he was coming to Sweden over Easter. The duo met him and his girlfriend Elke in Stockholm and together they travelled back to Gräsmark after 40 years 8. During the summer of 2012 Lerin / Hystad joined the Damo Suzuki´s Network´s tour in Japan. Documenting nine concerts and 18 different sets ranging from rock, noise, jazz, electronica and reggae. By joining the tour they explored concepts of improvisation and communication through music both from Suzuki´s perspective but also how it was received and understood by the audience. The tour was documented through recordings, video and photographs. Apart from documenting Damo´s tour the duo also explored other concerts and improvisations with other artists and musicians from the Tokyo experimental music scene, all the videos were posted on their blog9. The recordings they did of Suzuki´s concerts in Japan became the starting point for a concert at Fylkingen in Stockholm on February 11, 2013. The recordings were sampled and manipulated live during the concert. Together with Suzuki they superimposed the samplings with improvisation. The concert gave them the opportunity to explore Suzuki´s concept as participants. They concert was recorded and will be released on vinyl together with a booklet about their work with Suzuki 2 Can and the Krautrock Movement The rock and electronic influenced experimental music movement in Germany often referred to as krautrock started in the end of the 1960´s. The rock music that came out of Germany at this time differed greatly from the English and American blues and rock´n roll movements. Instead the krautrock bands mixed psychedelic jamming with ideas from experimental contemporary classical music especially composer Karlheinz Stockhausen10. Most notable bands associated with the krautrock movement are bands like Faust, Amon Düul II, Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Ash Ra Temple, Cluster, Neu!, Kraftwerk and Can. Inspired by new directions within the jazz movement with Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler the krautrockers moved away from the patterns of song structure and melody of much rock music in America and Britain, some bands within the movement also drove the music towards more electronic sounds contributing to the evolution of ambient music. Jean-Hervé Peron of Faust says: “We were trying to put aside everything we had heard in rock´n roll, the three-chord patterns, the lyrics. We had an urge of saying something completely different.11 Can was a band that formed in Cologne, West Germany in 1968 by Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay both students of avant garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. The group was soon joined by guitar player Michael Karoli and drummer Jaki Liebezeit. Can constructed their music largely through collective spontaneous composition which the band differentiated from improvisation in the jazz sense. Sampling themselves in the studio and editing down the results, bass player and chief engineer Holger Czukay referred to Can´s live and studio performances as “instant compositions”. The band enlisted the creative but unstable American vocalist Malcolm Mooney, a New-York based sculptor, with whom they released their first record Monster Movie in 1969. In 1970 Mooney returned to America on the advice of a psychiatrist, having been told that getting away from the chaotic music of Can would be better for his mental health. Can was now without a singer and while sitting at a café in Munich Czukay and Liebezeit discover the young Japanese traveller Kenji “Damo” Suzuki busking on the street. Can had a gig in Munich that same evening and they invite Damo Suzuki to join them on stage that same night. Damo Suzuki stayed with Can until 1973 during these years Can would release their most classic and successful records including Tago Mago, Ege Bamyasi and Future Days. The Beginning of Our Story Expressen - November 29, 1967. Lerin The article above was printed by Expressen on November 29, 1967 and it is the starting point for Suzuki´s journey to Sweden and Europe. When I first heard the story of how Suzuki came to Europe from Japan through a classified advertisement it interested me because to me it seemed that already back then he was developing a similar method and approach to life as he has today about his music and performance. Today Suzuki does not choose the musicians that he performs with himself but leaves that decision to the promoter and trusts in the idea that as long as the musicians have an open mind it will be an interesting concert. It seems to me that he had the same strategy when 3 travelling around in Europe in the end of the 1960´s, he was aimlessly travelling around letting one situation lead to another. Part of Suzuki's openness we have tried to apply to the process of this project as well. We have been interested in the concepts of chance and serendipity. Serendipity 12 could be explained as the act of finding something valuable or delightful when you are not looking for it, a pleasant surprise. I have been interested in Suzuki´s music for many years, not only his music but also the methods and concepts behind it. To me his method of placing himself in an unknown situation together with other people and creating something together is very interesting. I have in many of my previous projects both as a musician and an artist worked with improvisation and chance. As a musician it interests me because when performing as an improviser together with other musicians that I have not played with before it challenges me and brings completely new things out of my playing that I would not have been able to achieve if I would not have been in that situation. And as an artist I think the idea of improvisation is interesting and especially when the artwork needs other people in order to be realized. One example of this is my work Mammoth13 from 2008. In this work a life size mammoth sculpture was transported from the National Academy of the Arts in Bergen by crane, truck and train to the ski resort Finse in the Norwegian mountains. The project was realized through sponsorship and a big part of the process of this artwork was to convince the crane company, the hotel at Finse and NRK (Norwegian Television) to help me realize this project. The journey of the mammoth from Bergen to Finse was broadcasted on NRK14.
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