Rie Nakajima
Rie Nakajima is a Japanese artist based in the United Kingdom who works with sound and movement. She has exhibited and performed all over the world, charming audiences with her inventive mechanical bricolage: small motors, everyday objects, bowls, balls and toys set going on the floor of a gallery so that the space fills with a shifting, self-playing landscape of little sounds. In 2014 she received the Arts Foundation award for experimental music.
Is Spring a Sculpture?
"Is Spring a Sculpture?" is a collaboration between David Toop and Rie Nakajima, released as a limited edition CD and book on Lawrence English’s Room40 label. The work consists of a series of sound pieces and text fragments exploring the poetics of objects, ephemeral phenomena, and the ambiguous boundaries between sound, environment, and tactile form. Together, Toop and Nakajima sculpt a listening experience that is elusive and sensorially charged, extending their mutual fascination with the int…
Music for Voilà
Music for Voilà was prepared for listening in 'Voilà' (@voila_tokyo) shop in Jiyugaoka, Tokyo by Rie Nakajima and David Toop.
Roughly Random
*200 copies limited edition* Akira Sakata is a treasure of Japan’s free jazz/improvised music world. Rie Nakajima is a London-based sound artist with an international career in Europe and beyond. Sakata and Nakajima have performed together in Japan and other countries since the mid-2010s. When Nakajima came to Japan for a time in 2023, the two appeared at Ftarri, Tokyo, on December 4, performing two duo sets. Sakata, on alto sax and clarinet, forgoes ferocious sound-making and plays with calm el…
Unshaping
Artist Rie Nakajima is known for arranging small devices in an installation-like manner, presenting the movement of each device as a “performance.” This “performance” may be an attempt to highlight the interaction between humans and devices, as well as the states of response between devices and the space they inhabit, by minimizing human intervention. This piece is a recording of Nakajima’s performance in the courtyard of a castle, where she was invited to perform at a festival in France in 2016…
Utsuho
**Edition of 150** Recorded by Yoshiyuki Suzuki. Mastered by Francesco Covarino. Released March 21, 2022
Mani Mani
Edition of 200 copies. Screen-printed sleeve. Borrowing its title from a verse contained in the Man'yōshū poems, Mani Mani is the recording of the performance held by Pierre Berthet and Rie Nakajima under their collaborative project Dead Plants and Living Objects at Seanaps Festival 2020 in Leipzig. Water dripping in resonant buckets, riverberating rocks, small bowls, self-crafted engines and mobiles: the acoustic gestures of Berthet and Nakajima set into motion an heterogeneous ensemble of soun…
Polyphone (Book)
* Hardcover 16,5 x 23 cm 288 pages 67 color and b/w illustrations. German & French * The publication accompanying the eponymous exhibition brings together works by more than 20 international artists that focus on the encounter of multiple voices and sounds. Polyphone deals with perceptual aspects, as well as with the socio-cultural and political dimensions of polyphony. Here, polyphony refers to both the musical term and the linguistic definition according to Mikhail Bakhtin, who points to the a…
Fusuma
**100 copies** Rie Nakajima: a handle of Japanese sliding door (fusuma) from her grandmother’s house, Japanese rice bowls, coils, jars, shells, flower pots, plastic bags, tin foil, tin cans, chopsticks, a bamboo pot, stones, cups, and kinetic objects made by Rie herself.
Floating Weeds
Edition of 200. Japanese-born and London-based sound artist Ken Ikeda has previously appeared on the label’s project “Quark: How Does Invisible Sound?” (Q06). He now teams up with Rie Nakajima and Makoto Oshiro for a series of collaborations included in this CD alongside his solo opening track. The album title is borrowed from the 1959’s movie by Yasujirō Ozu called Ukikusa (Japanese word for Floating Weeds). Motors, sound objects, automated gestures, mixed materials as opposed to synthesizer-ge…
Dethick
Another church, another country, and another unique collaboration. Angharad Davies combines with Japanese sound artist Rie Nakajima and the virtuoso cellist from Distractfold ensemble, Alice Purton, in a series of explorations in the small church in the Derbyshire village of Dethick. The trio improvised, then developed and refined ten short pieces across two days, producing music which is as good as improvisation gets.
O Yama O
O YAMA O explores a certain domestic and democratic quality of everyday life, born through associations to folk music of Japan and a folding of myth, tradition, and routine; the non-spectacular and the sublime. Formed of musician and artist Rie Nakajima and Cafe OTO co-founder Keiko Yamamoto, the group has performed since 2014 at venues and festivals such as noshowspace, Ikon Gallery, Wysing Arts Centre, Supernormal, Borealis Festival, Mayhem, and allEars Festival.Nakajima’s performance often fo…
Live at White Cube
In collaboration between Christian Marclay and the London Sinfonietta, some of the world’s most renowned contemporary musicians have been invited to stage performances, including new compositions and live improvisation sessions inside the White Cube. Each performance over the course of the exhibition will be recorded, pressed and screen-printed live inside the gallery. This performance is from Rie Nakajima.
Rie Nakajima was born in Japan and lives and works in London. Nakajima works wi…
Four Forms
"sources of sound that have the lives of small creatures, maybe small creatures that hibernate in darkness but then come to life when exposed to the light. These creatures of which I speak are activated to perform their own cycles of drumming or scraping, all working together as if moving inexorably toward the sudden miraculous synchronicity of flashing light that a few fortunate observers have seen in firefly displays. What I am saying, should it be unclear, is that this is a kind of intensely …