BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Brisbane’s Nonsemble fuses pop with post-rock and chamber music for innovative works and performance experiences. The group’s latest album ‘Go Seigen vs. Fujisawa Kuranosuke’ was composed by founder and guitarist Chris Perren, and is based on a 1953 championship game of Go – the Japanese board game. Chris chats about the work ahead of Nonsemble’s gig at MONA this month.
So, the work is inspired by one kickass round of Go. How does a board game translate into music?
Kickass indeed! One of the greatest games of the 20th Century, so say the Go nerds. But to be honest, it could have been any game. For me, a lot of my love of music lies in the joy and beauty of abstract patterns. Sometimes I’d take the position numbers from a sequence of moves and translate that to pitches or rhythmic durations, and other times I’d just turn the shapes of stones on the board into melodies.
Why did you choose Go, anyway? Did Monopoly not sound as good?
I’m really interested in Japanese culture. I lived in Tokyo for a year and a half, learnt to speak Japanese, and I read a lot of Zen philosophy. Like many things in Japanese culture, the game of Go seems to encapsulate aspects of Zen philosophy. It’s so complex that you’d be hard pressed to ever repeat a game exactly in hundreds of years. It’s also a game of restraint— the moment you get aggressive playing Go is the moment you start to lose. The whole thing just fascinates me. Having said that, basing the album on Monopoly would have made the album title less cumbersome.
What does it sound like? Is it aesthetically pleasing or does it sacrifice tonality for the sake of the game?
I always want to write what I want to hear as a listener. So the game patterns are just a stimulus, they never take over. I realised early on that if I translated the moves into music in any really direct way, we were going to end up with a kind of music I wasn’t really interested in writing or hearing. Creating something engaging and beautiful was always the goal. So I like to think it is aesthetically pleasing.
There are hints of Cinematic Orchestra, Steve Reich, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, The Books, even some Ravel. So while it’s driven by all these odd patterns, it ultimately ends up sounding like a mash up of all the music I love, squeezed out through this hybrid rock band/chamber ensemble.
Can you play a mean game of Go yourself?
It’s so hard! And I’m pretty hopeless at it, to be honest. But I have played a few games and know the rules, so in a way that helped to understand the dynamics of the Go Seigen vs Fujisawa Kuranosuke game. But for the most part, those guys were playing at such a high level that for most moves I’m like, ‘I don’t get it…why?’.
Nonsemble will perform its latest work at the Void, MONA. May 23, 1pm-4pm.
‘Go Seigen vs. Fujisawa Kuranosuke’ is out now through bigo & twigetti. Download and listen on Bandcamp, iTune
This story also featured in Warp Magazine (www.warpmagazine.com.au).
Image supplied.
