- Midori Takada played the US for the first time in 2018, which shows how far her music has spread in the past couple years. Until recently, the easiest way to hear her revelatory debut solo album, Through The Looking Glass, was on YouTube. On that record, she used marimba, toms and even coke bottles to craft a somnambulant journey. Never released on CD, original vinyl copies of the minimalist classic fetched sums upwards of $750. But that changed in 2017 when the New York label Palto Flats, in conjunction with Switzerland's WRWTFWW, reissued two editions of the LP.
On Monday, Takada played a tight and sublime set at Art Institute Of Chicago, specifically the school's Rubloff Auditorium, a 950-cap seated venue often used for theatre. (The show was originally scheduled for Fullerton Hall, which seats 375, but demand called for a bigger setting.) For a physical performer like Takada, who has worked with the performing arts group Suzuki Company Of Toga on plays like Electra and King Lear, the added space amplified her control, her sound and her movements.
As the lights went down, Takada entered through the rear of the auditorium, emitting recurring crystalline pitches from a singing bowl, slowly stepping down the center aisle and up to a stage lined with cymbals, toms, a gong and a marimba. She used them all over the course of nearly 90 minutes, weaving her way between tufts of differing instrumentation.
It wasn't all percussion, though. Takada also used her voice, incanting on emptiness, form and dreams. Even though the audience was nearly silent throughout the performance, background noise, as it always does, reared its head. The sporadic din of coughs, creaks, camera shutters and whispers impacted the sound subtly, and was a gentle reminder—against the backdrop of transcendent sound and control—that Takada was playing to a crowd, even if the transmission felt entirely personal.
Photo credit /
Maria Tzeka