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Moisture: Essential for Absorbing Sound
The collaboration with Germany’s Carsten Nicolai is also fascinating. He is an artist known by the name “Alva Noto” and has worked with Sakamoto on several live performances and album productions since the 2000s. The piece featured in this exhibition is a video work based on a script he wrote, inspired by the adventure novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, combined with tracks from Sakamoto’s final album, 12. Of the two videos, ENDO EXO is particularly memorable.
As Sakamoto’s piano plays, the camera slowly follows the form of taxidermy and skeletal specimens. The title ENDO (inner) and EXO (outer) are said to come from Greek prefixes. In this case, the “outer” can be interpreted as the taxidermy (the skin), while the “inner” refers to the bones. As I gazed at the dry skull of an animal, I thought about the bone-conduction headphones I recently purchased. With those, I could make these bones vibrate, but I wouldn’t be able to actually “hear” the sound. No matter how much you shake the bones or the eardrum, if the lymph fluid in the inner ear doesn’t ripple, the sound won’t be recognized as sound. Moisture is necessary to absorb sound. Naturally, my focus shifted “inward,” to the watery content protected by the skeleton. The act of listening, it seems, happens much closer to the inner layers, near the mind or spirit, than I had realized.
