Client:
Masanori Oishi, saxophonist
Year:
2018
Deliverables
Photography
Videography
Strategy
Obscuring the boundaries between East and West.
SMOKE is a delightful project that crosses the boundaries between Eastern and Western aesthetics. More than just a cool effect, smoke in this project picks up on two Japanese concepts that also shaped the music of saxophonist Masanori Oishi’s disc SMOKE: that of SAWARI and MURAIKI, the idea of purposefully allowing noise into the tone of traditional instruments, because a pure tone is considered to be not as interesting as the natural coloration of timbre added by the “flaws”. Smoke was the title of a key work on the album, a protest song mixing Black Spirituals and the American national anthem, dedicated in remembrance of Eric Garner, who was tragically choked to death by New York City police for selling illegal cigarettes, and whose last words were “I can’t breathe”.
Smoke serves as a visual coloration for the images, but we took it a step further, applying a similar concept to visual focus, in which the images are constantly moving in and out of focus, sometimes just slightly missing it to emphasise this concept. The result is a mysterious and haunting symbiosis of visuals and sound, both inflected with their own “noise”.
