Through silences, three incredible performers entered the stage at National Sawdust: Rosebud Ben-Oni, claire rousay, and FUJI|||||||||||TA all quilted distinct performances rooted in being attuned to the audience’s reactions.

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Poet Rosebud Ben-Oni read from two collections 20 Atomic Sonnets and turn around BRXGHT XYXS bridging a space between chemistry, love, and humor. Before starting, she asked the crowd to take a minute to reset (it works better on Zoom, she notes).

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In a quick changeover, ambient sound artist rousay began. She dabbled with an assortment of found sounds; interview clips, sniffling, and what seemed like pencils sketching mutedly on paper to contribute towards a fabric of sound. At moments, she’d shift left and right in her chair and sing softly into the mic, like giving a dog a forehead kiss. rousay talked between songs to make it feel less formal, like a recital. My friend Luca draws a beautiful creature eating steak and gifts it to her later in the evening.

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rousay complimented her songs with open tunings, talk-sing, modulating vocals, and symphonic strings while gently playing an electric guitar. Scattered voices grew under a drone, overcast with softened felt piano, what seemed like noisy bar chatter, compressed audio of men talking, and doors opening and closing.

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For the last piece, she brought a poet LA Warman. What was particularly powerful about her performance was the housing emphasis of a single syllable, like a pick trying repeatedly to break a heavy sheet of ice. rousay accompanied, leaving space to waterfall in gaps over softened piano with mellowed radiator hiss and almost singing but not quite tipping the scale. Like that tipping scale swaying up and down and up and down, the Warman read, “How could I do this to me and call it love,” “How do I untouch the year I wasn’t touched?” “wearing it or being worn,” float in the pool, float to the bottom,” “love doesn’t take shape.” rousay left the last note unresolved.

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We learn to sketch our observations. FUJI|||||||||||TA, the headlining act, proved this. Designed to create a landscape rather than function as a musical instrument, FUJI|||||||||||TA’s (aka Fujita Yosuke) work is inspired by the Japanese “Gagaku.” Translated to “elegant music,” Gagaku is a genre of Japanese classical used for imperial court music and dances. Additionally, vocal arrangements for gagaku are typically intricate and by design.

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There were several distinct qualities of FUJI|||||||||||TA’s performance. One was the use of an air pump (fuigo), a device weighted with bricks dating back to instruments ancient blacksmiths used. In consistency, he operated the pump with his left hand while manipulating singular pipes with his right. This was an 11-pipe organ he built with his imagination. Without prior technical knowledge, FUJI|||||||||||TA’s tool was an interpretation fulfilled by sounds he wanted to create and perhaps, encouraging new ones that came as surprise. During one piece, he placed a flat rock atop a pipe to manipulate the amount of sound departing. He detached each one, blew into a contact mic, looped it, and repeated the process until he bred a novel patch of noise. The result was a collective layering of voices visually representing a ball passed around, traveling across the field in a few directions, but always forward.

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Minimal equipment leaves room to reimagine what limitations are and how to feed them in an entirely personal way. FUJI|||||||||||TA built his instrument over a decade ago specific to his growth as a sound artist and how it informs the directions of his music.

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But perhaps something I haven’t experienced before was his terse, consonant-focused vocals. In the room, the sounds sifted like small boomerangs. They fired in orbits until a droning landscape with the faint heartbeat of the fuigo in the backdrop reemerged every once in a while. FUJI|||||||||||TA used the pipes to reflect sound. And ultimately, his performance hacked into a very small doorway of human emotion; it propelled plenty of unexpected but remained grounded with consistency.

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About Jane Lai

Jane is a community-oriented musician and collaborator based in Brooklyn, NY (who occasionally dabbles in writing).

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