async surround

Admission is free. No advance reservations. Your seat will be assigned to you when you pick up your ticket at the box office. Seats are assigned on a first come, first served basis. The box office opens one hour before the event.

Ryuichi Sakamoto’s first album after his cancer diagnosis in 2014, async feels like both a culmination and a turning point. Inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky and a renewed fascination with natural sounds, Sakamoto conceived async as a soundtrack for a non-existent film composed in non-traditional musical time. Weaving across 14 tracks a heady vibe of spoken words, moody distortions, field recordings and ethereal tones, async prompts a meditation on mortality and the infinite of the everyday. Never intended as a stand alone album, async belongs within Sakamoto’s larger exploration of the relationship between sound and image, accompanied as it was by a short film competition and a collaboration with Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul. This program presents the three competition winners and Weerasethakul’s dreamlike aysnc-first light (2017) to be followed by an async surround album listening event. A further collaboration, async surround features Sakamoto’s 5.1 stereo mix of async accompanied by abstracting images of nature and ordinary objects conceived by Japanese visual artist Shiro Takatani.

Shosho ni mitsu

Japan, 2017

Digital video, color, 5 min. Director: J. K. Wang.

Poetry of Banality

Russia, 2017

Digital video, color, 4 min. Director: Mikhail Basov.

In a Happy Place

India, 2018

Digital video, color, 7 min. Director: Sandup Rongkup.

async-first light

Thailand, 2017

Digital video, color, 11 min. Director: Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

async surround

2018

Digital video, color, 84 min. Director: Ryuichi Sakamoto, Shiro Takatani.

Total runtime: 111 min.