various artists
yasujiro ozu - hitokomakura
(and/26) 2xCD

This is the second of a series of label projects pertaining to film directors. The first one was for Andrei Tarkovsky, the third one is currently in progress and pertains to Michelangelo Antonioni's "Tetralogy" (L'Avventura/La Notte/L'Eclisse/Deserto Rosso).
This second release turns its focus upon Yasujiro Ozu's use of "pillow shots" (i.e. short poetic pauses that appear between the acting segments of his films. The term "pillow shot" was not coined by Ozu himself, but several years after his passing in the early 1960s by a Japanese journalist who was trying to draw a comparison of the intermediate scenes to "pillow words" found in traditional Japanese poetry. This is a double CD release with both CDs featuring audio plus a cross-platform compatible PDF booklet containing pillow shots (courtesy of Criterion Collection) and liner notes.
Each artist who appears on this release was asked to choose one or more "pillow shots" to use as inspiration for their pieces. A link to web pages containing a large assortment of pillow shots" was provided, and accordingly, the pillow shots were reserved on a first come, first served basis. The artists also watched the films from which the pillow shots came from in order to get a sense of how their chosen pillow shots were employed by Ozu.
The sound work featured represents a wide range of artistic approaches, but as always with these projects, the artists were chosen specifically, based on their previous work and on how it might contribute to the collective whole of each project.

Featured artists include:

ALEJANDRA & AERON
AONO JIKKEN ENSEMBLE
ASUNA
MARC BEHRENS
KEITH BERRY
LAWRENCE ENGLISH
HERIBERT FRIEDL
BERNHARD GUNTER
HACO
JOHN HUDAK
JASON KAHN
HITOSHI KOJO
KOURA
DALE LLOYD
YOSHIO MACHIDA
ROEL MEELKOP
KIYOSHI MIZUTANI
DEAN MOORE (with Michael Shannon)
STEVE RODEN
SAWAKO
MICHAEL SHANNON
STEINBRÜCHEL
TAKU SUGIMOTO
SUKORA
TOSHIYA TSUNODA

Text by Doug Cummings (Masters Of Cinema and Filmjourney.org) and Dale Lloyd (and/OAR).