Listening Experience: Music for Rest Rooms by Yumiko Morioka & MSCTY_Studio

In collaboration with Slow Wonder and Sonic Minds, Reethaus presents an invitation to collective rest by MSCTY_Studio and pianist Yumiko Morioka, a pioneer of Japanese ambient. With Music for Rest Rooms, listeners are invited into a state of exception from the rush of urban life.

Observing the way that the private booth in Tokyo has been repurposed from a public phone box to a mini-office-for-hire, where people undertake hasty video calls in bustling stations, James Greer and Nick Luscombe of MSCTY_Studio bemoaned the proliferation of infrastructure for to-dos and urgency alongside the dearth of spaces oriented to release and gentleness. The booths became a spatial symbol of the state of urban consciousness. Contemplating this dispiriting trend, Greer and Luscombe began to fantasize about an alternative network of sound capsules, a thought experiment “about dignity and permission in a world which is exhausting and demanding of our time.”

To develop the notion, they made the journey out to the pianist Yumiko Morioka, a mysterious figure in early Japanese environmental music who had recently made her own escape to a Rest Room, moving to the wilds of Oniishi in central Japan’s Gunma Prefecture. During the visit with Yumiko, Luscombe and Greer followed her in the paces of her everyday life, which unfolds amid pure skies, birdsong, mid-river picnics, musical mountain farmhouses and psychotropic glimpses of cedars at the edge of the tree line. Besides field recordings, these memories were captured in photographs, fragments of conversation and notes that formed a “graphic score” for five moments that were then put to music in the studio.

The result is Music for Rest Rooms, a clearwater capsule that offers an exception to the cult of pressured attention. Making subtle use of the ambient sounds of the mountain landscapes and flights of fancy from Yumiko’s piano, MSCTY has wrapped the peace of Oniishi into this sonic pillow.

Reethaus is delighted to present Music for Rest Rooms in a space purpose-built for collective repose, unwinding and exploration. This event is presented in collaboration with Slow Wonder, a Slowness experiment in living at Wonderfruit Festival in Thailand, and Sonic Minds, a year-round research initiative by Wonderfruit that explores the intersection of sound, mindfulness and nature.