I went to this show at Asimina's Outer Space dance studio; I love the room and acoustics there. I had not heard Murayama or much about him really. I know Jason, have played with him once and saw him play once. The night was supposed to be an Antoine Beuger composition, an improvisation, and a dance piece (Asimina). I showed up and was one of 3 or 4 non-performers in attendance. Jason and Seijiro sat down, Jason with his electric guitar, e-bow and small amp, Seijiro with a snare drum and a bunch of sticks, etc; I wasn't sure if the improv or the composition was to happen first, so I closed my eyes to wait for the first sound. After two or three minutes of (excellent) street noise I heard what I thought was maybe a scratchy transistor radio or maybe something small and motorized on the snare drum's surface... looked up and Murayama had his hands on his lap, eyes closed and the sounds were coming from his mouth. He spent the rest of the improvisation doing exclusively vocals, and was totally amazing at it. Crazy low and high creaking, croaking, whistling, scratching sounds, multiple things going on. Jason played sporadic e-bowed notes, I think just three notes (do re mi) over the course of the piece. What he did was not all that interesting per se, but a perfect counterpart to the vocalizations, the room, and the external noise. Jason was silent maybe 60 or 70 percent of the time; Seijiro would pace himself more or less by his breath capacity, which was pretty long with some of the extreme techniques he was doing. Really pretty amazing. When they ended, no one really clapped. It was just kind of funny and awkward.
Asimina then did a dance piece of 10 or so minutes, based around putting on a pair of elbow-length red gloves and a pair of ballet slippers. Writing about dancing for me is like making music about architecture (that is, I don't know what to say), but I enjoyed it.
Jason and Seijiro set up for the Beuger piece in a different part of the room. Jason played very similarly to the improv, but with a wider pitch range and not just e-bow, a bit of plucking. Seijiro used his snare drum, with a dowel rod (rubbed on the head like a brush), also a brush, and a bowed cymbal. His sounds were interesting, subtle, and again complemented very well by Jason's pure tones. We saw the score afterward, which was just a number of pages, each with two small numbers denoting the number of sounds to be made by each player (1, 3; 2, 1, etc) — Jason, correct or clarify if I'm off. During the longest silence, in the middle of the piece, some people walked up the stairs almost to the door of the venue, and I heard a guy say "...luxuriating..." and then they walked back down.
Anyway, good show, great space, and dance!