HITOSHI KOJO

A Japanese artist living in Brussels.

Emerging from a background of visual work and music created throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, he turned in the latter part of that decade toward a more elemental form of composition. Stones, plants, wind-touched branches, and fragments of the everyday—objects encountered by intuition rather than intention—became instruments in his hands. Their recordings are gently tuned so they may resonate together, sometimes meeting the tones of traditional instruments or the grain of the human voice. Yet within the temporal unfolding of each piece, no sound is given precedence; every element is left open, equal, and allowed to breathe. This ethos continues in his occasional performances and installations, where form arises without hierarchy.

Many of his recordings appear on his own label—formerly Octpia, now omnimemento—often housed in handmade packaging crafted with the same quiet attention as the works themselves. Under the alias Spiracle, his earlier pieces were released on labels such as Drone Records, Mystery Sea, taâlem, and the Helen Scarsdale Agency. Since moving to Europe in 2004, he has collaborated with artists including Michael Northam, John Grzinich, Yannick Dauby, Emmanuel Holterbach, Jonathan Coleclough, Colin Potter and Andrew Chalk. In 2020, he began releasing works under the name sonomono that capture sound in its unadorned, immediate presence.

In recent years, his practice has expanded to photography. Using silver-halide film, he creates multiple-exposure images in which landscapes, people, and natural objects overlap like layers of time—subtle traces of presence suspended within light.

OMNIMOMENT

Most of the objects and environments in our daily life are created for specific purposes and are assigned particular roles. Even most of the “natural world” we encounter has been altered for our convenience, placed within transformed surroundings, or abandoned after fulfilling its function.

If such objects and environments are used in a completely different manner, or placed in situations wholly disconnected from their intended roles, their concreteness becomes extremely apparent and a kind of “parallel world” emerges. This approach was explored by many surrealists in the early twenties, and later became well established in music history as musique concrète.

Even though I employ the same method, I am more interested in entering this “parallel world” through action — experiencing a kind of “molecular communication” with objects and environments through all my senses — rather than simply making the “parallel world” appear. If I dare say, my aim is to summon a “primal world” from “nature,” one filled with the swirling energies of the elements such as water, fire, wind, earth, and void, through this “molecular communication.”

Such nature is often regarded as an imaginary construct, a utopian illusion that does not really exist. However, since it is grounded in the concrete matters of daily life, it should more accurately be called a “crucial reality.” The expression “crucial reality” may evoke the cruelty of reality. Yet when I enter into reality through “molecular communication,” I feel that the “primal world,” woven from elemental energies, is incredibly beautiful. Therefore, I accept it rather as the “crucial beauty of reality.”

Although this beauty is always present everywhere, it is difficult to perceive in daily life because it is concealed by the showy brightness of practicality. It is similar to the way we cannot see the beautiful stars during the daytime.

The “crucial beauty of reality” is omnipresent in our everyday surroundings. Is it useless to record the actions that summon it into the sensuous world? At the very least, nothing is useless in this “crucial reality,” once it is released from the spell of practicality.

from omnimoment CD booklet