Musical boundaries are no barrier to Yasuaki Shimizu, whose forty-year career spans an impressively broad range of genres. He is recognized for his crossover albums, film soundtracks, and high-profile installations and collaborations. His peerless back catalog reached a wider audience following the 2015 reissue of his band Mariah’s 1983 classic Utakata no Hibi, a masterful hybrid of Japanese folk and pop idioms. Also reissued in 2017, cult favorite Kakashi playfully weaves together minimal dub and musique concrète. In 2018 Shimizu took these reissued albums on a six-nation European tour that included the Roskilde Festival, one of continent’s largest music events.

In the mid-1990s, Shimizu’s passion for the music of J.S. Bach surfaced in two groundbreaking recordings of the entire Cello Suites—the first-ever tenor saxophone interpretations of these pieces. Shimizu has also recorded as Yasuaki Shimizu & Saxophonettes, and in 2006 he relaunched the Saxophonettes as a saxophone quintet. Following the release of Pentatonica (2007), an album of original and traditional pentatonic tunes, Shimizu returned his focus to Bach, releasing his arrangement—for five saxophones and four contrabasses—of the Goldberg Variations in 2015.

A prolific composer for film and TV, Shimizu has produced soundtracks for, among many others, the Oscar-nominated documentary Cutie and the Boxer (2013), which won Outstanding Achievement for Original Music Score at the Cinema Eye Honors.

This is a standing room performance. If you require ADA acommodations, please email boxoffice@nationalsawdust.org.

SUPPORT FROM MOTION GRAPHICS

Eight years removed from his celebrated debut album, Motion Graphics (a.k.a. NYC electronic artist Joe Williams) has returned with a brand-new release, Glossolalia EP. A transcontinental collaboration with Japanese artist Utena Kobayashi, the record—which also features remixes from Portland ambient/new age duo Visible Cloaks and Japanese electronic music veteran Kuniyuki Takahashi—explores a delicate strain of ambient pop, its nuanced contours reflecting Williams’ unique ability to wield production technology in a way that feels not just poignant, but deeply human.

That skill is something Williams has spent years developing, most notably in his own work, but also in the service of others’ projects. While casual observers may think of the lengthy gap between Motion Graphics releases as a full-blown hiatus, Williams’ past eight years have been anything but restful. He contributed to FKA Twigs’ landmark 2019 album Magdalene, remixed iconic Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, collaborated with Visible Cloaks on the quietly majestic single “Terrazzo,” and also continued to be a part of Lifted, the musically adventurous, PAN-affiliated ensemble headed up by Future Times founder Maxmillion Dunbar. The art and gallery worlds have also come calling, commissioning Williams to compose music for installations by acclaimed video artists Tommy Malekoff (Desire Lines, Forever and Ever) and Cyprien Gaillard (HUMPTY \ DUMPTY). And though Williams isn’t new to working with film—back in 2013, he scored 12 O'Clock Boys, a documentary about dirt bike culture in West Baltimore—he was invited in 2019 to remix the soundtrack to Akira, one of the most venerated anime movies of all time, for a special installation by graphic artist YOSHIROTTEN at the Parco Museum in Tokyo.

Japanese music and culture have long been of interest to Williams, who’s been actively collecting records from the country for more than a decade. That, of course, has significantly influenced his own music, and listening to the lilting grooves, tender melodies and acoustic flourishes of “Sanka” and “Glossolalia,” it’s not hard to hear echoes of Japanese art-pop acts like Dip in the Pool and Yasuaki Shimizu. At the same time, Williams isn’t interested in mere pastiche; if anything, he’s drawn to the way that Japanese musicians have historically used technology as a vehicle to synthesize and recontextualize sounds from all around the globe. The best Japanese music often feels both inherently futuristic and disarmingly universal, and Motion Graphics is guided by a similar approach, which helps explain how both “Sanka” and “Glossolalia” can sound so beautiful and organic, despite the fact that they were not only constructed on William’s laptop, but were made without him and Utena Kobayashi ever being in the same room.

It would be wrong to describe these new Motion Graphics songs as minimal, but they do exude a sense of humility, even as Williams draws upon elements of contemporary classical and the Reichian, avant-garde sounds that came out of places like NYC’s The Kitchen during its 1980s heyday. Those looking for a bit more grandeur, however, will likely be drawn to Visible Cloaks’ “Translingual Mix” of “Glossolalia,” which infuses the track with orchestral swells while

transforming Kobayashi’s vocals into a spellbinding series of cathedral-ready choirs. Kuniyuki Takahashi’s take on the song applies a softer touch, warming up the source material with lush drones and wandering woodwinds to create a swirling, richly immersive listen.

After years of helping other artists realize their creative visions, it’s somehow fitting that Williams has now turned the tables, tapping into his own extended network to bring Motion Graphics back to life. A lot may have changed during the past eight years, especially in the music world, but if Sanka / Glossolalia is any indication, Williams’ studio and songcraft has only strengthened during his time away from the spotlight. One can only hope that he doesn’t wait quite so long to come back around again.