Jisei

Percussions: Kyohei Sugihara

“Jisei/辞世” (death poem) was composed with a narrative manner, telling an imaginary journey of a person flashbacking various moments in life before leaving the world. Unfolded by the reflection on death and realization of transience of life, I wished to interpret both lyrical and poetic character of percussions. The instrumentation consists of a combination between sustaining idiophones and a set of unpitched drums, with the presence of two contradictory sound worlds to create a meditatively sentimental continuity of calmness, while the tension created by the latter was driven through the contrasting dynamic, polyrhythms, unexpected pulse/silence, and sudden attack(s).