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Shokyo Ontei Series
Utech Records has at last arrived at a point to disclose information regarding the third, and likely last, entry in the label’s fine art series. A number of radical musicians from East Asia, primarily from China and Japan, have been invited to reconsider the multiplicity of possible connections between text and music. The title of the series – Shokyo Ontei – a neologism that means literally word echoes/sound writing, emphasizes this overlap between the process of creation of meaning through sound and through the written language.
As means to understand, order and engage with the world, text and music have much in common. Most importantly, both allow for the creation and projection of personal, complex, emotionally and intellectually affective structures of meaning. East Asian texts and orthographic practices present a particularly rich topos for the investigation of musical possibilities. Chinese characters (which were used historically throughout East Asia and provided a shared means of communications between the region’s disparate cultures), in particular, provide a hugely flexible conjunction of sound, meaning and visuality. Ancient literary, religious and scientific texts provide numerous challenges to our ideas of narrative logic and the proper relationship between reality and its modes of representation. The employment of written and spoken texts in magical practices, from the oracle bones of second millennium BCE China to the kotodama word magic of early Japan, presents another fascinating area of investigation.
In the form of calligraphy, East Asian orthography has as more in common with art or ascetic practice than it does with simple notation of meaning. Calligraphy can easily be read as performance - a real-time improvisation between ink, paper and the creative freedom and expressive energy of the brush wielder. Examples are legion: the 2nd century Chinese calligrapher Ts-ai Yung, for example, talks of writing almost as a spiritual discipline, “at first sit in silent thought, then seize the moment as inspiration arises. The mouth should be stilled and the mind free of thought. Deep and mysterious, spiritual and beautiful, nothing could be more perfect”. Calligraphy was used in Zen monasteries as a tool to attain a deeper, intuitive awareness of reality. The hero of the 11th century Japanese novel, The Tale of Genji, writes in a hand so beautiful that women fall in love with him, sight unseen.
A package is being designed to utilize hand-rendered text from each of the artists and essays from Alan Cummings. The first release from VagusNerve (Li Jianhong and VAVABOND) will be available August 2009 followed by contributions from Sachiko, Atsuhiro Ito, Hasegawa-Shizuo, Aural Fit and Masayoshi Urabe among others.

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