Burying a Sound in a Bomb Shelter | An exhibition with Lane Diko

A video letter about a sound that lives hidden in some Japanese gardens.

This spring, photographer Lane Diko and I made an installation together for Shitsurai, an exhibition held every year at The Terminal in Kyoto, a cafe and gallery in a building almost a hundred years old. This year's theme was PAUSE.

The piece is built around a suikinkutsu. A suikinkutsu is a ceramic vessel buried under a stone basin in a Japanese garden. Water drips down from the stone basin above-ground into the hollow underground and as the drips strike the water sitting in the hollow it rings out, a bit like a bell.

Because the suikinkutsu has two parts — the basin above ground and the buried chamber below — we built the installation to match. Upstairs in the garden, Lane's photographs hang from the verandah and you hear the recording the way you would in a temple. Down in one of the building's old wartime bomb shelters, we tried to make it feel like you had climbed inside the suikinkutsu's chamber itself.

The recording was made at Enkōji Temple, in the east of the city. What surprised me — and what most of this video is really about — is how little the recording sounded like the real thing once I got it home. Most of the work, it turned out, was the weeks I then spent trying to make it sound like the actual sound felt.

See if you can spot the layers of sound underneath the suikinkutsu recording.

Thank you for listening.

Links & Resources:
Join a Sound Walk in Kyoto: https://www.kyotoinsound.com
Read the full letter on Substack: https://ohayo.substack.com

Previous Video Letters:
The Kyoto FOMO Trap: https://youtu.be/f4kvK1R-8fo?si=wqqVFiKcqeAw3TcX
What is a Sound Walk?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6AsLHMrDwE
An Archive of a Life: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmYenfZM5pE
Finding "Home" in Kyoto: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ribNcMcOCe4

#Kyoto #Suikinkutsu #FieldRecording #SoundArt #DeepListening #Documentary #SlowLiving #KyotoJapan #JapanTravel #Shitsurai

Видео Burying a Sound in a Bomb Shelter | An exhibition with Lane Diko канала Simon James French