Koki Nakano is a composer and pianist, born in 1988 in Fukuoka, Japan. His first album, Lift (2016), was a collaboration with French cellist Vincent Segal. With the title referring to the precarious ballet movement, he explored the relationship between movement, balance and space and drawing on the influences of Pop, Jazz and Minimalist music.
His latest album, Oceanic Feeling, is described as a celebration of ambiguity. To quote from his record label No Format:
The album’s title is borrowed from an expression coined by the French writer and musician Romain Rolland in 1927. In a letter written to Sigmund Freud, Rolland described the oceanic feeling as “the sensation of eternity, a feeling of being one with the external world as a whole”. While this concept of oneness permeates Nakano’s whole album, the music also deals with his inability to fully live in this so-called oceanic feeling, capturing thus the composer’s longing, frustration and ultimately search for harmony within his own limitations.
Movement plays a big part in Nakano’s music; he states: “There’s no sound without movement, there’s no movement without sound. The two are inseparable”. For Oceanic Feeling, he watched dancers move to what he played in the Parisian artist residence he inhabited and where he strived to keep that connection between movement and music: “Sometimes the dancers would tell me I was going too fast and that they couldn’t move their bodies like that, and so I would adapt the music. I don’t want the music to become disconnected from the human body,”
For the accompanying video to External Cephalic Version, he invited renowned choreographer Marion Motin to perform alongside her young son on “La Muralla Roja”, a surreal-looking casbah-style post-modern building. The Meditteranean setting seems at one with Motin’s movements which take on a Flamenco feel, both in energy and movement.
No Format explains: “External Cephalic Vision” refers to the process of turning the fetus in the womb for the sake of a safer birth. Adding another layer of poetry to a song inspired by processes of motherhood, Marion Motin this time shares the stage with her son. With the freedom of youth evident, a warm and playful atmosphere is created as the two dance in parallel. With a blue sky, clouds and the Mediterranean sea (Calpe, Spain), they, the viewer in the labyrinths of “La Muralla Roja”, a sublime colored fortress inspired by the North African kasbah. The video pays tribute to Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill, who passed away earlier this year.
Order Oceanic Feeling here: https://idol.lnk.to/OceanicFeelingYT