Go Seigen vs. Fujisawa Kuranosuke (2014)

Prelude
I
II
III
Postlude

Length: 29:00

Instrumentation: Piano Quintet, guitar, drum kit.

Premiered by: Nonsemble at Dots+Loops Concert Hall to Dance Floor, SYC Sudios, 20 March 2014
Additional performances:“Screen Stories” Concert, The Globe Theatre, 7 November 2014;Kaleidoscope, Brisbane, 5 June 2014;MONA Museum, Hobart, 23 May 2015;GoMA “Lynch by Night”, Brisbane, 29 May 2015;“Trichotomy & Nonsemble” concert, Cupo, Brisbane, September 2016;Bang on a Can Summer Festival, Mass MOCA, MA, USA, 26 July 2018 (mvt I);DonkeyJam "Games For Ensemble" Tour, Norway, November 2018 (12 November: Kultursenteret ISAK, Trondheim, Norway; 13 November: Galleri Kulviksvingen, Norway; 14 November: DABA Art Café & øko, Stjørdal, Norway; 17 November: Hornemansgården, Trondheim, Norway)
Media:
Detailed breakdown of the piece on Nonsemble Blog
Appearance on WNYC New Sounds, Feb 2015
Appearance on WNYC New Sounds, Oct 2015
Feature Article on AMC Resonate
Go Seigen vs Fujisawa Kuranosuke on Bandcamp
Recording available through bigo & twigetti, London: More information on the album release here.

Program Notes

Go Seigen vs. Fujisawa Kuranosuke is a 30 minute work using the moves of 1953 championship game of Go as stimulus for harmonic, rhythmic and melodic material. It's an experiment in extracting musical ideas from abstract patterns and sequences, and allowing these ideas to develop intuitively into a large-scale work.I'm drawn to the game of Go because it combines two of my major interests: Japanese culture, and complexity that emerges from simple processes. Go is played on a grid with small black and white stones, and operates on simple rules - basically, if your stones are surrounded by the enemy, they die. From this basic principle flows a great deal of complexity.The compositional process was in two main phases: extracting musical ideas from the go game, and intuitively developing those ideas.Using the sequences, their positions, proximities, and relative danger or safety of the moves, I cooked up systems to translate them pleasingly into rhythms, melodies, or sequences of chords. From there I responded fairly intuitively to the materials which had emerged in this process, allowing their character to dictate the direction. The ideas slowly grew outward in an organic process of pruning and elaboration.The work exists in its final form as three movements, each in a kind of ternary form, surrounded by a prelude and postlude. The first and last sections of each main movement are similar - sort of like variations of each other.| Prelude (90bpm) || Ia (144bpm) | Ib (96bpm) | Ic (144bpm) || IIa (105bpm) | IIb (75bpm) | IIc (105bpm) || IIIa (80bpm) | IIIb (100bpm) | IIIc (90bpm) || Postlude (60bpm) |

Reviews

http://www.cutcommonmag.com/cd-review-go-seigen-vs-fujisawa-kuranosuke/
Stephanie Eslake, Cut Common Mag:
When I learnt this work was inspired by a championship game of Go, I hadn’t the wildest clue what to expect. How can a musical work be based on a Japanese board game? According to Brisbane composer and guitarist Chris Perren, who lived in Tokyo for half a year, he would “take the position numbers from a sequence of [Go] moves and translate that to pitches or rhythmic durations, and other times…turn the shapes of stones on the board into melodies”. Well, whatever he did, it rocked – quite literally. Nonsemble’s latest release for chamber septet fuses post-rock and minimalism to craft a monumental contemporary classic.‘Prelude’ opens the album cinematically, with rich strings and gentle piano. It’s dark, and it’s serious. There’s the occasional ill-fitting note, but the resulting crunch is all part of the auditory satisfaction. The start of ‘Movement I’ combines percussive strumming with open tuning, and quickening interjections by the piano. Repetitive rhythms give a strong post-rock drive as drums support jolts from the strings. Despite the inspiration for the album, it doesn’t really sound all that Japanese – and would no doubt be highly disruptive during a game of Go. It appears to reflect the tension one would encounter in a mind game as opposed to a board game. As the movement reaches its middle, the piano pounds disturbingly on every beat before returning to the fullness of the previous movement. It all comes together toward the end, crazed as the Dresden Dolls and powerful as Godspeed You! Black Emperor.‘Movement II’ is perhaps the most Eastern sounding, and haunting strings begin with upward pitch bends. Though each movement is close to 10 minutes, it’s the sort of music that would work well in a longer form – if all the tracks were joined together, it’d be just as effective. Having said this, I feel exhausted and emotionally drained after every movement. By the time ‘Movement III’ comes about – gentle as droplets of liquid (or the clinking of little Go pieces) – I welcome the momentary change of pace. A stunningly played cello solo with minimal vibrato is a standout in this track, which reaches its climax with a series of thumping, metronomic, percussive pulses.‘Postlude’ is a much needed meditation on every sound my mind was forced to soak up in the past half hour. I start to feel anxious that there will be no closure – but the work acknowledges the energy it steals from the listener and finally rewards with a few major chords. They don’t linger too long – but thank goodness the album ends on one.Having listened to the entire album, do I now understand how the work sounds like Go? Not really. But I sure as hell will return for repeated listenings to continue to figure it out.

https://acloserlisten.com/2015/06/03/nonsemble-go-seigen-vs-fujisawa-kuranosuke/
Chris Redfearn, A Closer Listen:
Ominous piano chords resound; a violin is strummed with growing anxiety; shuffling percussion imbues a sense of agitation. Just over a minute in, drums enter and the clouds break, the piano briefly bestowing calm before whisking us somewhere else. What relentless drama is unfurling before us?Fans of traditional strategy games will likely be surprised that the drama – the inspiration for and the name behind Go Seigen vs. Fujisawa Kuranosuke – is in fact a Championship game of Go played in 1953. It’s a delightfully novel idea, but does raise the question (especially having watched videos such as thison YouTube) of exactly how composer and guitarist Chris Perren drew stimulus from such superficially dry source material. The answer involves broadening one’s understanding of “inspiration” and appreciating that, while a significant match, this Go championship game played over 60 years ago holds no unique, ineffable power – as Perren explains:‘It really could have been any game. It’s not like I believe there was some mystical aesthetic beauty locked in the numbers which I just had to decode. What the game held was a wealth of interesting abstract patterns, and manipulating interesting abstract patterns is sort of how I come at music. So… rather than decoding those patterns directly into music, what I was really trying to do was throw them into the pond of my mind and see what ripples they made.’The context helps better understand the composition, which is presented across five tracks and performed by Nonsemble, a Brisbane-based ‘indie chamber ensemble’ now on its second release. Perren, who quickly returns to ACL following the marvellous Software of Seagulls LP in April, here plays with timings and polyrhythms in wonderfully intricate ways both overt and subtle. The start of the second movement (“II”) introduces a simple two-note violin/viola refrain that builds above drawn-out piano and cello progressions. The refrain starts in 4s but in time switches to 3s, then shifts to and fro once more, each time jarring the momentum steadily building. The strings cease with the section’s abrupt end, but return 20 seconds later in a higher register – and this time remain in 3s. The momentum has been shifted up a gear.The seven players that comprise Nonsemble are four strings players, a pianist, a guitarist and a drummer, hinting at a fusion between chamber composition and post-rock that seems to grow more pronounced through the movements. Employing a full drum kit emphasises the music’s mathematical complexity, each hit conforming to the metre as rigidly as Go stones do to the board’s grid, while the bowed strings seem to evoke the emotions of the players. The drums also serve in moments with more prevalent guitar to steer the music closer to post-rock – with the middle passage of “II” and the breakdown in “III” reminiscent of the trickier passages of The Samuel Jackson Five. These parts perhaps upset the otherwise assured balancing of genres; the finest composition can be woven to create whatever tapestry one wishes to perceive, but a band performs something of its own creation, whose mood to which we must adapt.Minor niggle aside, this is well worth your attention. The biggest triumph of Go Seigen… is how it delivers such mathematical abstraction in such an appealing package, stirring the heart with a soaring line or arresting mood change. The sweeping string melody that emerges in the final movement of “III” initially bears an infusion of sorrow before building dynamics render it in more strident colours. Simultaneously, we feel the subconscious warmth of familiarity – the same melody was hinted at in the fifth minute of the previous movement. It’s a wonderful close to a record that, for all its laudable experimentalism and cerebral source material, doesn’t forget to also make us feel.