nokami

Project: Yuki-onna - 2008

Origin:

Yuki-onna (雪女? snow woman) is a spirit or yōkai foundin Japanese folklore. She is a popular figure in Japanese animation,manga, and literature. Yuki-onna is sometimes confused with Yama-uba(”mountain crone”), but the two figures are not the same.[1]

Appearance

Yuki-onna appears as a tall, beautiful woman with long hair on snowynights. Her skin is inhumanly pale or even transparent, causing her toblend into the snowy landscape (as she is most famously described inLafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things).She sometimes wears a white kimono,[2] but other legends describe her asnude, with only her face, hair, and pubic region standing out against thesnow.[3] Despite her inhuman beauty, her eyes can strike terror intomortals. She floats across the snow, leaving no footprints (in fact, sometales say she has no feet, a notable feature for many Japanese ghosts),and she can transform into a cloud of mist or snow if she isthreatened.[4]

Behavior

The Yuki-onna, being associated with winter and snowstorms, is said insome legends to be the spirit of an individual who has perished in thesnow and cold.[5] She is at the same time beautiful and serene, yetruthless in her killing of unsuspecting mortals. Until the 18th century,she was almost uniformly portrayed as evil. Today, however, stories oftencolor her as more human, emphasizing her ghostlike nature and ephemeralbeauty.[6]In many stories, Yuki-onna reveals herself to travelers who findthemselves trapped in snowstorms and uses her icy breath to leave them asfrost-coated corpses. Other legends say that she leads them astray so theysimply die of exposure. Other times, she manifests holding a child.When a well-intentioned soul takes the “child” from her, he or she isfrozen in place.[2] Parents searching for lost children are particularlysusceptible to this tactic.

Other legends make Yuki-onna much moreaggressive. In these stories, she often physically invades people’s homes,blowing in the door with a gust of wind, to kill them while they sleep(though some legends require her to be invited inside first).Exactly whatYuki-onna is after varies from tale to tale. Sometimes she is simplysatisfied to see her victim’s death.Other times, however, she is morevampiric, draining her victims’ blood or “life force”. She occasionallytakes on a succubus-like manner, preying on weak-willed men in order todrain or freeze them through sexual intercourse or a kiss.[2]Like the snowand winter weather she represents, Yuki-onna has a softer side.

She sometimes lets would-be victims go for various reasons. In one popularYuki-onna legend, for example, she sets a young boy free due to his beautyand age.She makes him promise to never mention her again, though, and when herelates the story to his wife much later in life, his wife reveals herselfto be none other than the snow woman. She reviles him for breaking hispromise but spares him yet again, this time out of concern for thechildren she has born him (but if he dares mistreat their children, shewill return with no mercy. Luckily for him, he is already a lovingfather).[6] In a similar legend, Yuki-onna melts away once her husbanddiscovers her true nature.

ref.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuki-onna 

 artist: Sawaki Sūshi 佐脇嵩之

work: Hyakkai Zukan 百怪図巻

date: 1737

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Technical:

Software:
Quartz Composer
VDMX

 

 

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Music:

project description

These pieces were composed using field recordings processed within amodular environment created in plogue bidule.the concept was to create thesoftware patch, collect the source samples and record the final piece(s)within the same day. in many cases, the improvisational aspectsencompassed not only the actual ‘performance’ of the piece, but also’on-the-fly’ programming as the piece was being recorded; controlled,stochastic and random elements all comprise significant aspects of the’final’ product.

Michael Trommer

Michael Trommer is a Toronto based producer and visual artist who hasrecorded for such top electronic music labels as Transmat, Wave, Truffle,Stasisfield, Interchill, Monocromatica, Thinner and Stratagem. He recordsunder his own name, as well as aliases such as ’sans soleil’, ‘minidisco’,'Hydraulic’,and ‘Manitou2′.Broad-minded in his approach to electronicmusic, Michael also creates gallery-based audio installation work. 2005saw him creating a site-specific sound installation for Australia’s’Liquid Architecture’ exhibition. Another of his recent works was anet-based audio-manipulation project which was part of the ‘from 0 to 1and back again’ exhibition at Kunsthalle Schirn in Frankfurt; this becamethe subject of many radio specials on both Deutsche Welle and HessischerRundfunk.

In 2000, his work was nominated for the Prix Italia forexperimental music.His field-recording based material has been featured on London’s ResonanceFM, www.vagueterrain.net, www.insine.net, www.monocromatica.com, andwww.stasisfield.com. A site-specific field-recording based installation isbeing exhibited in New York state’s upper Catskill forest(http://www.restlessculture.net/deepwoods ) from the end of May.As a liveshow, sans soleil was featured at the 2003 Movement Festival (a.k.a.DEMF)in support of Michael’s full-length album on Detroit’s legendary Transmatlabel. 2007 saw him performing alongside Frank Bretschneider and OlafBender of Berlin’s Raster-Noton label, as well as headlining Toronto’s’inthemix’ festival (with VJ Nokami) and closing the ‘Electric Eclectics’festival of experimental and improvised music.

Michael also performsregularly as part of the live electronic improvisation collective ‘i/o’(http://interaccess.org/studio/iomedia.php).Nominated as one of eyemagazine’s ‘10 talents to watch for 2006′, the coming year promises to bebusy. Expect more installation work from Michael in 2008: a piece based onMies van der Rohe’s Toronto Dominion Centre will be presented at the StateGallery in St. Petersburg, Russia in the autumn; in addition, asite-specific collaboration with video artist Arnold von Wedemeyer isplanned for downtown Berlin later in the year.

Contact:
trommer@sympatico.ca
http://www.myspace.com/mtrommer

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Live:

(Mutek - Montreal 2008)

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