Tomoko Sauvage is a Japanese sound artist and musician from Yokohama, based in Paris since 2003. She plays an instrument of her own design made of porcelain bowls filled with water and amplified through hydrophones, a kind of natural synthesizer that produces sound from waves, drops, bubbles and underwater feedback, shaped by the acoustics of each room. Sauvage studied jazz piano in New York and later Hindustani improvisation, and a 2006 concert of Indian water-bowl music led her to start working with bowls.
*2024 Stock* This reader brings together artistic and theoretical contributions on the instertitial nature of sound. This issue is addressed through a variety of prisms, such as format, language, politics, or new technologies. The Middle Matter is a reader which brings together thoughts on the nature of sound; its substance, specific qualities, and potential—with a specific curiosity to its propensity to occupy the spaces in-between, the instertitial gaps between different spaces, times, cultur…
Ginevra Bompiani (w/ Caterina Barbieri and Tomoko Sauvage) - Il Calore Animale / Francesco Cavaliere - Zoomachia Disc 1
After some brilliant releases by Soundwalk Collective over the last few years, Dischi Fantom returns with the first two installments of their new Sussurra Luce series, Ginevra Bompiani’s ‘Il Calore Animale’ (Animal Warmth), combining texts by the writer with new musical pieces by Caterina Barbieri and Tomoko Sauvage, and Francesco Cavaliere’s ‘Zoomachia Disc 1’. Bridging the …
*Edition of 200* Ginevra Bompiani is most likely unknown for fans of experiential music. In Italian literature and thinking, however, she is highly regarded writer, editor, translator, essayist, and academic, whose fiction, particularly, is informed by linguistics, feminism, and literary theory, and verges on the surreal and the fantastic, making her interdisciplinary effort, ‘Il Calore Animale’, collaborating with two of the most singular voices in contemporary experimental music - Caterina Ba…
Francesco Cavaliere and Tomoko Sauvage embody a tactile audio visual display, radiating the color green into sounds and painting meditative music. By transforming collected objects into invented instruments and scenography, each motif becomes a dedication to a specific situation, an anecdote or a symbol, sometimes real and other times absurd, that the artists have encountered through their travels and conversations: the Chinese myth about a man wearing a green hat, naming convention of Japanese …
Fischgeist is the third solo album by Tomoko Sauvage, a Paris-based Japanese experimental musician and sound artist. For more than a decade, she’s been working on her unique ‘natural synthesizer’ by combining water, hydrophones and glass or ceramic bowls. The album was recorded in a former water tank in Berlin, a building with a special architecture and acoustics. Sauvage was inspired by the building’s history that she discovered by coincidence during her recording sessions. bohemian drips, a Be…
Reverse board-printed inner and outer sleeve; Edition of 500. Musique Hydromantique is the second solo album by Tomoko Sauvage archiving many years of her performance-based practice on the waterbowls -- the natural synthesizer of her invention, composed with porcelain bowls filled with water and amplified via hydrophones (underwater microphones). While her first album Ombrophilia (2009) was studio-recorded/composed work, Musique Hydromantique is about experimentation and improvisation with the e…
Ombrophilia is a collection of sound experiments I made with porcelain bowls filled with water between 2006 and 2008. Inspired by Jalatarangam, traditional Indian instrument, I started to play the 'waterbowls' with wooden spoons and metal wire (Mylapore, Jalatarangam Revisited). Since I immersed hydrophones in them, I have tried various ways of resonating the bowls without touching their surface : flicking, stirring, waving and dripping water All the compositions here are multitracked and…