AKIO SUZUKI (JP)
RESONANT SPACES
64'04''
CD + BOOKLET
CATALOG: 9ED007
RELEASED 17 MAY, 2019
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DESIGN: MOTE STUDIO
The work presented here for the very first time is the full documentation of Japanese sound artist and instruments builder Akio Suzuki’s solo works performed as part of ‘Resonant Spaces’, a tour with UK saxophonist John Butcher arranged in 2006 by the Arika organisation.
‘Resonant Spaces’ allowed people to experience sound in some of the remotest regions of Scotland for a series of site-specific performances in natural, prehistoric, manmade and industrial locations including the largest coastal cave in the UK (Smoo Cave), the Wormit reservoir, the largest industrial ice house (Tugnet Ice House), the WWII massive 4 storey, 30m wide cylindrical oil tank located in Lyness, the 2,500 year old - and Scotland’s largest stone circle - Ring of Brodgar, and the Hamilton Mausoleum which has an impressive reverberation decay of 15 seconds!
The fascination for the power of echo and the process of listening in relation to the audience are here magnified to create a very particular bond of rare beauty between the musical creation and nature’s environment.
The tour was supported by the Scottish Arts Council Lottery Funded, Tune Up, 300 million, NVA, Whiteburn Projects Ltd.
Project coordination and booklet photos by Keiko Yoshida.
Akio Suzuki’s diary translated by Alan Cummings.
Recorded by Ruari Cormack.
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.
Designed by Mote Studio, Berlin.
Calligraphy by Akio Suzuki.
Saxophone on track 5 by John Butcher.
Thanks to Arika’s Barry Esson & Bryony McIntyre for making the Resonant Spaces tour possible.




Born in 1941 in Pyongyang. Since his infamous “Throwing Objects Down a Staircase” event at Nagoya Station in 1963 and the self-study events which followed, where he explored the processes of “projection” and “following” in the natural world, Suzuki has pursued listening as a practice. In the 1970s he created and began performing on a number of original instruments, including the echo instrument Analapos. In 1988 he performed his piece “Space in the Sun”, which involved purifying his ears for twenty-four hours in nature on the meridian line that runs through Amino, Kyoto. In 1996, he began his “o to da te” project where he seeks out echo points in the urban environment. Has performed and exhibited at many venues and music festivals around the world, including Documenta8 (Germany, 1987), the British Museum (2002), Musée Zadkine (France, 2004), Kunstmuseum Bonn (Germany, 2018), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo(Tokyo, 2019), etc.