A review of Ayuo's CD - E no Naka no Sugata (絵の中の姿) － What We Look Like In The Picture by Gerald Van Waes.
From the following page:
First of all, I must say this is a beautiful looking package, which is, like the booklet, printed on high quality Japanese paper. This tickles all senses, including the touch sensibility for a change. Colours and chosen graphics and forms match beautifully, and when you take out the booklet some details change, thanks to a cut out window, revealing this like another surprise...
It is clear the music is conceptual, with references to Ayuo’s childhood, like a collection of songs and memories that had a special meaning to him. Like a related soul, with a similar origin of experiencing the world, from the same period (for me I think for when I was around 21-23) I had or could have picked out the same songs with comparable significance, like the two Lou Reed songs from the “Berlin” album. For the same reasons a few other similar tracks from the same period and artists became something I was moved and personally affected by, like the songs from Syd Barrett, Bertolt Brecht/Weil, and a Joni Mitchell song called “Roses Blue”, which gets an ending from “Both Sides Now”. The lyrical quote of “No one touches me” reminds me also of my childhood, and brings in more associations :
Social Affection and intelligence..
...Lately, on television they showed, as an educative attempt, that it is a better cure for your emotions to hug people. They showed how people who were constantly exposed to direct live reactions on the street made such people’s energy more aggressive, over-offensive, and over-defending and so on... You know they also say that abandoned children without proper care or education and constructive ideas from fathers, when grown ups, may find criminal activity a normal survival technique of life’s activity. Just some which were only temporalilly abandoned, -and who were also not used to be hugged and be loved, do care to find their own steps to retain this nature, something which not always easily grows...
But what still worries me more and which comes to mind here too is that those people who still don’t recognise any form of love and spontaneous affective understanding, (except a rule of dependence), not only literally behave much more like idiots, like small children, they show preferably a more “animalistic” nature. The presence of their limitations also makes preservation of some cultural level in society a bit more difficult to maintain, because they often don’t care or want to know from all these unwritten rules which we have built out of social friendships and trust, and that became part of a social culture, with the condition of more freedom where we no longer need to protect everything so much (-for me 'trust' is like the quality norm of a culture-). For the normal evolution of things (and for those "normal" people) we have a few social ideas that protect people from the few failures that can happen (like with the social security system or the systems for unemployment). But many more people who do not care use the protections and assurances during failures, only to uplift their personal profit, while also taking advantage of the loose trust between people, because they don’t really care, not even when it ruins society.
Against such people, openness and positivism to an open world just sounds so naïve. Ayuo writes : “we are not intelligent enough for all the good we mean”..
No, we are not so much developed that everything we have fits with the human level we can preserve, when the door is also open to the wild west type of world which is also ready to reshape the world, to replace it by their street game visions of a more arrogant primitive nature...
(And I could even continue to worry, thinking : what if such nature is let free to take things over by force, when we let the rules of the streets rule too much, under the protection form of a multicultural openness, society becomes like one big mafia world, with perhaps even some forms of dogma based “religion” as a so called hope, but also, the opposite, when we let only the idealists rule with protective rules, totalitarist regimes, as a system without wisdom, are also never too far away as a result for their ideas, if you would let them..)..
All such thoughts come in mind when growing up in this world of change and increased interaction in the world. Also Ayuo adds here and there in the lyrics his own kind of growing questions to some of the songs. BUT in some way Ayuo also achieved in it his mature point where he becomes like a catalyst, as the predecessor of a different generation with a clairvoyance of how a world could hang together after all...
World Music only as to discover its own roots...
If you consider how the term “World music” started, it started in fact from rather conservative ideas around the first idea of what “World Music” would be, something I never liked too much because I noticed much disadvantage with that. The term opened up after a while, bringing in mostly not too spontaneously developed crossover possibilities starting from standard traditional forms, but that last kind of forced opening could easily forget how this still starts from the same starting point which was conservative and limited and based upon recognisable repetitions. If only there would be taken another starting point for a world related genre based upon “creative music” understandable for each generation, and country of origin, taking elements from all over the world only for this creative inspiration, this would be much more like “World music” for me. But since that term is already taken for something else, I could only think of new terms like “all-world” music for music with traditional World music and creative elements from anywhere in the world and with a completely open vision, or when really more neutral and completely open to whatever there is interesting in the world, this is purely creative in the true sense a “whole-world” music style which is understandable and similar anywhere in the world. Often for this purpose, western crossovers were taken as a good example, but it is in no way just typically western. For this kind of fusing style, Ayuo’s music is visionary, and a perfect, if not one of the best examples.
Being raised by an Iranian stepfather, living in the US for a short while, with Japanese predecessors, knowing much of Japanese traditions, fine English examples, something Middle Eastern music he is a true World citizen, with respect for his own countries heritage, as well as other achievements, and that alone is already a good starting point.
After taking to the composer I realized why Ayuo had such a natural way of a world-vision roots. He explained :
"I grew up between two official step-fathers and two official step-mothers, not counting all those in between. The good side was that I was exposed to a lot of different life styles and culture. On the other hand, it left me without a stable home and without solid roots in one specific culture. Therefore, I started to use my music and writings to create virtual "home" incorporating all the elements that was around me when I grew up. Therefore, the Persian influences, the Noh, the Celtic influence, the psychedelic music, etc. If I tried to do only one of them, it may start to sound false. Altogether, it could create my very own "roots music".
The relatively “known” and covered songs which Ayuo interprets here, are given a new life and meaning and version, also with the guitar work, and if necessary were changed even with words to specify that personal and creative meaning. This makes these interpretations like new and beautiful songs, gives them a renewed significance, which also makes these lyrics hang on effectively.
The guitar arrangements on “Roses Blue” from Mitchell are brilliant, with a small surreal guitar part, and with each verse exploring different, even dark thoughts and emotions. Using bouzouki is also a beautiful alternative sound for the acoustic guitar on some tracks.
Also a few Japanese texts are interpreted : poems by Chuya Nakahara to music -Ayuo :
"He was one of the first poets to become influenced by Dadaism and Avant-garde European art and literature, while still having a solid background in traditional Japanese literature ; Shuji Terayama, who established the experimental theatre group, Tenjo Sajiki, in the 1960's was very much influenced by him. The imagery in the songs ”Circus" and "A Summer Night in the City" is very surreal"... "The music (of the last song) is very melancholic. It's the feeling you get when you are walking about alone in the city."- ;
They hang together well with the English ones, and aren’t too different in nature.
For these and other songs Ayuo invited a good body of musicians. Jandranka is a former Bosnian singer, now living in Japan with whom Ayuo worked before, but here her voice never sounded more beautiful. Also Japanese singers Yoko Ueno and Masumi Hara bring on their own flavours. With Shu-ichi Chino on the acoustic and electric Wuritzer piano, Ayuo makes a few electric guitar improvisations with a Middle Eastern touch (one time in ¾), while playing darbuka as percussion.
Conclusion.
This is another, brilliant release of Ayuo, and as a song related album it is the best I have heard from him so far. It could mean something on the international market, if only people would start to recognise the inevitable great talent of Ayuo, something which has not been achieved yet, despite effort of support by people like Peter Hamill and such (who worked with him before). Any Acid folk lover, I recommend just to start with this album and “Red Moon” and I am sure also you will become a fan.
PS. The album includes a new version of the suite of songs released as "A Painting of You and I" in “Red Moon”. Because the original title could be translated a number of ways, the English title here appears as "What We Look Like in the Picture".
Contributors : Ayuo (guitar, vocals) with Ueno Yoko (vocals), Hara Masumi (vocals), Jadranka (vocals, saz, guitar), Chino Shu-ichi (piano), Takahashi Yuji (piano), Sawada Jyoji (sound collage)
Extra background thoughts by Ayuo :
The Story..
"The story behind "A Picure of You and I", "Izutsu", "Lament" in both Carmina and Izutsu and the two songs set from "The Dream of Red Mansions" in Kazue Sawai's album are basically the same.
Edgar Allen Poe's poem, Annnabel Lee also has the same story. The writer, Yukio Mishima, once started writing a short story based on Edgar Allen Poe's Annabel Lee, but found it so similar to Izutsu, that he put in a quotation from Izutsu after he finished the story.
They are about a boy and a girl, who grow up together in the same village. They fall in love and marry. One dies and the other continues to live in the memory of the life they had together. The story seems very simple , but it's actually about one's identity and roots.
The importance of England
Peter Hammill told Ayuo that he raised his three children in a small town near Bath, England because he wanted to give them a solid sense of roots.
Ayuo : "I never had that because my parents were moving around constantly. In this modern age, being able to grow up with the same people in the same place is important. because that way you really get to understand people. The musicians that I toured with, and that went on to tour the States all wound up with broken homes." (He was tallking about menbers in Genesis and King Crimson.)
"I've never had the chance of being in one place long either. Just when I turned three, I was in Berlin. I was in Stockholm, when I was four. Then from the time I turned six to when I was fifteen, I was in New York City. Sometimes, we moved to a few different places in one year. My familly menbers kept changing too. I've had Iranian and English step-fathers, as well as an Irish-American step-mother."
Peter: "Oh well, for me, it was all in England."
The "Folk Society"
Kurt Vonnegut wrote an essay that his greatest influence was his cultural anthropology teacher at College. Robert Renfield, his teacher, wrote constantly about what he called a "Folk Society". He wrote that although primitive societies all have their various differences, there is one thing that is in common. It is that they are all so small that everyone knew each other for a lifetime. Experiences were communicated by word of mouth, so the old were respected for their memories. There was little change. People were all able to treat each other as people instead of as things because they each of them knew where they were coming from and what they were thinking.
Now this tends to sound like the lost paradise or the garden of Eden. People throughout history in every land have written about such utopias. In the 60's, people went out to communes to try to create such a society. They failed because they no longer had such tradition, had no fixed rules of human relationships, couldn't really understand each other nor about human nature.
"When I look at small societies, I also notice that people living in them are often much more envious of any who is more successful than everyone else. People there also hate anyone that is slightly different, and are highly prejudiced. There is a composition I wrote called "The Taiko player of the Forest", which was one of the tracks deleted from the CD, "AOI", released from Tzadik. This composition is about someone, who is trained as a drummer because he's slightly different than everyone else. People in his village all treat him like an outcast, and outcastes were often trained to be musicians because they couldn't fit into society. This kind of situation existed in small villages in both Japan and Africa, and probabbly many other places."
human-kind ?
"For me, the most interesting and influencial book I've read in the recent years is Matt Ridley's "Nature vs Nurture", which is a book that examines the roots of human behavior. Matt Ridley is a science journalist. He writes about how our genes absorb experiences from the society we grow up in, and our immediate environment. Scientists who study genes now believe that all human beings on the earth are descended from the same group of people that originated in Tanzania in Eastern Africa. Parts of this group started to leave the African continent from about 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. The differences in the environment and how each set of people coped with it made the changes in the people around the earth. But we are still 99.99% alike."
"Matt Ridley also writes about Kasper Hauser. Kasper Hauser was a man who grew to be 16 with almost no human contact. He was able to learn some vocabulary by imitation, but had a problem understanding grammer. Matt Ridely writes the ability to learn language is inherited, but the language one learns to speak is imprinted from the society they are raised in. The same goes for culture. And that there is a time limit for this imprinting, which is up to about the time you are 15. As I was raised in various places until I was 15, reading this had quite an impact on me.
The German film director, Werner Hezog, made a film called "The Enigma of Kasper Hauser" with music by Popul Vuh's Florian Fricke.
I believe that understanding about life science will help uncover a lot about human behavior, and that this is what we need." Ayuo