Tune Up - Music Touring Across Scotland

Tune up: Resonant Spaces: John Butcher and Akio Suzuki

A Scottish tour of two experimental musicians who use the unique acoustic properties of performance spaces as active partners and foils during improvisation.

This TUNE UP tour will take two of the most influential and deeply original thinkers in sound of the last fifty years, and celebrate a unique quality in their music; the ability to treat time and space, reverb and echo as unique foils, tools and overarching themes in an improvised setting. John Butcher and Akio Suzuki will tour to six unique and site-specific venues that each have interesting and distinctive acoustic properties of resonance and echo.

John Butcher
One of the leading and most exciting improvisers in the world, Butcher is a startling sax player with a beautiful and personal approach to his instrument, soaked in overtones, multiphonics and acoustic feedback. His performance in a huge and abandoned reservoir in Japan in 2002 was the original impetus for this tour. On the recording you hear him
testing and interacting with the huge booming echo; it's a startling document and bodes well for what should be a thrilling series of concerts across Scotland.

Akio Suzuki
Akio Suzuki is known as a pioneer of sound art, but the breadth of his activities and the form of his works far exceeds the normal boundaries of sound art. It is perhaps more as a "quester after sound and space" that he has received the most attention from artists in many fields. Suzuki's journey as an artist began in 1963 with a performance at Nagoya station, in which he threw a bucket full of junk down a staircase. The inspiration behind this performance - the idea that if one were to hurl an object down a well-balanced stairway, a pleasant rhythm might be the result - took the desire to "listen" as its subject. That desire to hear, to listen has remained the one constant in Suzuki's stance as an artist.