Last month, I attended all five events for WOBC’s 75th anniversary band-a-thon fundraiser for El Centro and Obies for Undocumented Inclusion. The experience of seeing twenty-one live performances in under forty-eight hours alone was exhilarating, if not slightly overstimulating. However, this made the more atmospheric and immersive acts stand out more, and no concert was a better example of this than Yuka Honda’s concert at the Cat in the Cream.
Honda’s influence as a solo artist and in Japanese-American trip-hop duo Cibo Matto is undeniably the stuff of indie rock myth. That said, her work seems to have a distinct Oberlin appeal. Modern Music Guild members, TIMARA majors, and countless WOBC DJs filled the Cat’s seating minutes after doors. By the time Honda took the stage, students had started forming rows on the floor encircling the stage, a measure normally taken for the Cat’s massively popular jazz forums.
Crossing the stage to large applause, Honda’s entrance was almost silent. After playing with a handheld tape recorder, she stood at the Cat’s grand piano and played a sparse, eerie string of notes before abruptly pausing the recording and walking over to sit behind her digital setup.
The Cat fell completely silent as Honda wove her first soundscape together with her mixer and synthesizers. Recordings of birdsong, running water, and chirping insects were flanked by the whir of grainy synthesizers, crafting a world that felt beautifully sentient and hypnotically mechanical, wild, yet distinctly human. Honda seldom looked up for the entirety of the show, with her eyes planted on the equipment in front of her. It was odd seeing a near-motionless performer bounce between ideas so quickly, but this spontaneity proved beneficial. Breakcore beats were interspersed with slow, psychedelic passages. Propulsive, simmering grooves would rise and fall with seamless grace. There were several points in the performance that could have been danceable if it weren’t for the brevity of each section.
The improvisational nature of the set paired with its long, uninterrupted format made the listener focus on texture and emotions rather than song form or melody, and this was especially apparent in the second half of the performance. Honda would spend several minutes building different sounds and textures around singular, droning motifs, transforming it into something entirely new. She was able to deftly transition between ideas, keeping the audience enveloped in the world she was building. The greatest example of this was towards the end of the performance, as she took out the tape recorder she had used to record the haunting piano melody at the beginning of the show. After playing the recording back, Honda proceeded to sample and manipulate the recording. This seemed to be her inviting the listener to peer behind the curtain of the otherworldly atmosphere that she had built, to show how mundane and natural her soundscapes truly were. Rarely do performers have the confidence to break the listener’s suspension of disbelief, and Honda did it with both virtuosity and creativity.
As the performance ended, many members of the audience ran up to the stage to take pictures with Honda, who graciously obliged as a queue formed next to the stage. When I leave most concerts, it feels like stepping out of an artist’s world that I enter at each show. Honda had built an entirely new and unique world in front of an audience, and one that stayed with me long after leaving the Cat.
thecounterpoint.org 