Take Off Time – exploring sound by motion
Tomoko Nakasato & Jakob Gruhl
Live Performance / October 19, 2024
The performer Tomoko Nakasato is situated in an acoustic white cube: a 4m × 4m surface is her instrument, and her body is her mixing console. Together with Stephan Kloß and Jakob Gruhl (sound design & composition), they create a space for exploration, improvisation, and interpretation of sounds and noises, breaking them down into granular components, deforming, abstracting, and constructing harmonic ambient textures. Here, contact meets musical improvisation on a purely nonverbal level.
Sound-motion-body relations describe the interactions between the performers in relation to the sound. The performative character is shaped by situational decisions. A language is developed that communicates through associations, seeks contact with sound, turns away from it, plays with it, sinks into it, and dances on and with it.
Jakob Gruhl
Jakob Gruhl, a graduate museologist, has acted as an interface between art, music, and technology for more than 10 years. He is co-founder of the Halle-based multimedia studio Ectoplastic and co-designer and co-editor of the music software Mazetools. Jakob is also a founding member of the Center for Immersive Media Art, Music, and Technology (ZiMMT) in Leipzig. He has initiated projects such as the “Immersive Sound – Forum for 3D Audio” and the “Spatial Audio Network Europe.”
Tomoko Nakasato
Tomoko Nakasato, from Hokkaido, Japan, began in the 1990s as a hip-hop street dancer and combined this experience with techniques from contemporary dance, ballet, sound art, and physiotherapy. She has been living and working in Berlin since 2008. Since 2011, she has worked internationally with artists such as Ilpo Väisänen (Pan sonic, Die Angel), Dirk Dresselhaus (Schneider TM, Die Angel), Jochen Arbeit (Einstürzende Neubauten), Damo Suzuki (Ex-Can), Takako Suzuki, Takehito Koganezawa, and Frank Bretschneider (Raster-Noton).