This past May, Sarah Hennies and I sat on a rock near the Tivoli train tracks that overlooked the Hudson River, gushing in shared reverence over the great Japanese composer and ceramicist Tori Kudo and his enduring, happy accident-prone collective Maher Shalal Hash Baz.

I was surprised that Sarah and Tori had never crossed paths, considering their mutual embrace of “error,” which I recall Tori wrote was intended to reflect our “imperfect lives,” within deceptively sparse music shimmering with unrest that oscillates between confusion and delight.

I emailed Tori and was heartened to learn that he was familiar with Sarah’s work and looked forward to exchanging sentences. Here is part one of an email exchange between Tori Kudo and Sarah Hennies that took place between June and August 2024, edited by Jonathan Pfeffer.

SH: I teach “C’est La Dernière Chanson” in my composition class at Bard College every year to show how to work concisely and effectively in a very small space, but also because it’s thrilling to see the strong responses it elicits from students. Reactions are all over the place from laughter to confusion to delight and more, but the one thing that ties all the students and myself together is my most favorite response to music: “What *IS* this??”

TK: You are the first person to tell me that your favorite is “C’est La Dernière Chanson” and I am thrilled. Whether to repeat a musical idea once or twice and then finish it, or to repeat it several times for minimalist expression can depend on the strength of the material. In the case of “C’est La Dernière Chanson,” the material often wasn’t worth repeating. When I think about why, it’s because the world was as undeserving of me as I was of the world, and the number of repetitions was determined within that framework.

I listened to “Motor Tapes” [while I was in Budapest recently] and felt the freshness of a generation that can treat the mundane past with a meta sense of otherness through the sound of the guitar. The speed of the percussion, with changing its pitch, alters as if passing through a water filter, and in response to the third element that enters, a fourth and fifth intrusion also occur. The piano starts re-outputting the accumulation of these elements. Strings and flute, which are no longer able to return to the original dimension of the percussion, begin to form an upper layer of alienation, like a routine, like a commute, like a yawn. For you, [I wonder if] repeating a certain number of times might be a form of struggle.

SH: This was very true for many years but it’s also a way of expressing love for the material. After I transitioned and changed my name and gender, I saw my old work in a new light and vowed to stop making abusive work; I liked myself now, I didn’t need to beat up on it anymore.

TK: At the beginning [of “Clock Dies”] when the two high pitches begin to detune slightly, it reminded me, as far as I know, of James Tenney’s Postal Pieces. But I soon realized that the differential pitch was not the main theme, but a mechanism to follow the relationships between three things. I also understood that it wasn’t about rhythmic deviations, nor did it have any rock-historical obsessions like the third-beat delay in Black music funeral marches.

The structure itself was simple, and the material could exude a pop quality that could be played in a club when programmed into music software. But after the transformative phase, akin to a second movement, such poses of approaching or not approaching the secular disappeared. Especially the quiet motifs, which begin after a long silence, were no longer about technicalities like pitch or rhythmic deviations, but about an ethical contemplation within the sonic frame of the word “Clock Dies”, compelling thoughts like “What do we do when time ends?”

SH: The work and labor of repetition has always felt very important to me. Steve Albini said he was a sound engineer who “just liked the work.” I was recently talking to my friend Judith Hamann about our goals and values as we reach middle age (I’m in my mid-40s now) as fairly well-established artists. Judith said, “The goal is just to be able to keep doing the weird things we like doing.”

When I was younger maybe this sentiment would have disappointed me but it seems that simply continuing is both the goal and struggle of the no-longer-young artist. And what does “C’est la Dernier Chanson” do? It continues. If you like something enough to write it, perform it, play it for other people, put it on a CD, then you love that stuff. You want it to continue, I’d do anything to make sure it continues. “Dernier” feels like it ends only because it had to, because the CDs were full.

TK: Until April of this year, I was a mobile library driver in Tōon City, where I live. Hearing that John Cage drove a school bus to the end made me feel like I should do something similar. If I were to translate it to an American context, it would be like driving a vehicle with books selected without bias from “Trump supporters to Biden supporters” and visiting remote settlements and mountain schools. It was sad to see the elderly patrons I had grown close to pass away one by one, like teeth falling out. As in America, the children had overlapping negative characteristics from different home environments. But most of them had grown up with Pokémon.

Librarians do not recommend specific books on their own initiative, but they have a duty to thoroughly investigate and respond to reference requests. They have the right to refuse orders from higher authorities to include or exclude specific books. As a driver, the best I could do was to place my favorite books in prominent places, but even that allowed me to contemplate the act of listening to the self-narratives of people from different backgrounds.

From Dostoyevsky to the present, I think all expression is condensed into “Why do bad things happen if there is God?” or “Is it possible to escape this frame?” I feel that what I create must be in contact with the interface of this history of expression. Moreover, my background is generationally rooted in punk as taught by Mayo Thompson, and my father was a potter in the lineage of utopian socialism, like Cornelius Cardew’s father, Michael Cardew. Thus, almost inevitably, the main concerns in my creations are theories of group improvisation, rhythmic and pitch deviations, and leaving some results to chance in the kiln. When listening to other people’s music, I have developed a bad habit of judging through such filters.

When I try to eat duck dishes in a shop where only foreign languages are spoken, it is a lonely, incongruous taste mixed with unexpected developments and predictable Berlin flavors. Neither approaching nor distancing, the customers and the dogs each stayed in their places. As the night deepens, with drinks like palinka, one customer says, “Budapest has the most beautiful cafés in the world. White coffee and black milk must be served there.”

The difference in the thickness of the corpus callosum connecting the left and right cerebral hemispheres is not due to gender differences but to individual differences. Music is neither an arrow nor a circle, nor a group of floating adjacent masses of times but like “une machine abstraite.” In this respect, “Motor Tapes” is an advance on [David] Rosenboom’s work. The grand finale, both above and below, is always Bells. The bell tolls for thee.

SH: I loved the Bookmobile when I was little. I looked up Toon City on the map and was delighted to see that you live in a small town. Other than ten years spent in Austin, TX I have lived in small towns almost my whole life (Louisville, Urbana, Ithaca, the village of Red Hook) and I prefer it.

I’ve had a quote of yours on my Facebook profile for more than a decade that simply says, “I am punk.” I was raised on punk rock (D.C. and San Diego post-hardcore especially) and starting at 16 years old and even more intensely in college, John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Harry Partch, and Luigi Nono. Although Cage certainly had a fine sense of humor, it was the seriousness of all of this music that appealed to me. The intensity and focus of Hoover, Drive Like Jehu, and socialist/anarchist post-war avant-garde composers [embodied] the kind of greatness I was looking for as a teenager when I was surrounded by the drunk, stoned, and mean punks of mid-’90s Louisville, KY.

But I was [also] a lonely kid [who] loved the goofy, absurdist comedy of The Residents, Renaldo & the Loaf, Space Ghost Coast to Coast, and so much more. These things made me happy in a way that the so-called “serious” music I loved couldn’t. While I badly needed humor in my life at the time, it never occurred to me that I would do it myself. It was a big deal for me when I realized I could be funny in my music.

In 2016 I made my piece “Falsetto,” a piece of performance art where I give myself more to do than could possibly be performed and then everything falls apart for half an hour in a very real, barely controlled chaos. One of the first times I performed this piece someone came to me after the show and in a very worried and timid voice asked me, “Is it okay that I laughed at that?” This was an important moment when I realized I could be funny without sacrificing any of my other values. In fact, the humor heightened the intensity and darkness of it all.

I think “Return Visit to Rock Mass” appealed to me so much right away not just because I loved the music, but because I could see that it was made by an artist deeply committed to a set of highly personal, artistically rigorous values and concepts who was still having fun. I had never heard anything like it at the time, and yet it’s so pleasant and playful. I love an album that doesn’t tell you how you’re supposed to feel about it. 

When I lived in Austin, TX I co-hosted a radio show for about ten years on Sunday nights. One night near the end of a show I was playing Reiko Kudo’s “This Fall” from “Kusa,” another one of my favorite albums. The song was on for a couple minutes before the station phone rang and the person on the other end, angry, said to me, “Is this serious?”

This is one of the reasons I love “Dernier” so much. While it may not be clear what exactly is “going on” with that music, at the very least it’s clear that the people making it care DEEPLY about what they’re doing and I really respond to that.

TK: When I was a teenager, I was bound by the phrase “Passion–REALISM–realism was the key” in the liner notes of “Metal Machine Music,” which led me to divide music not based on the “seriousness” you mentioned, but rather on whether it was friend or foe, or more precisely, seeing friends in foes and foes in friends. Because of this, after the flattening of all distinctions in the post-’90s era, I felt the end of rock history, similar to the end of jazz. But at that time, you were into punk. In short, punk is a way of living that expresses distance from the mundane in various ways. Punk is not of this world.

Your punk is a decade later than mine. For me, post-hardcore evokes the same emotions as talking about the punk collectives of geographically distant Indonesia. But I do understand “Comment c’est” that experiences imprinted in one’s teenage years can become formative experiences that shape one’s life.

As you kindly described it as “caring DEEPLY” and “artistically rigorous values,” in the past, I had many rules such as “no overdubbing,” “no rehearsals,” and even the Adorno-like “no rock.” Regarding the “prohibition of time machines,” the ban was lifted by Rick Potts, who brought the concept of sampling into improvisation in the ’70s, so I could naturally accept Zeitgeber’s “layering of different times for personal reasons.” Anyway, such commandments stemmed from my conversion to the idea that the “creator of the singing bird” should take precedence over the “bird’s song” itself or “love for the material.”

Like the musicians in Ethiopia during the era when music was banned, I would leave home pretending to go to work once a month, skip work, go to the studio, and record the remnants of rock that remained in me after being scraped off by prohibition, which resulted in “Return Visit to Rock Mass.” The chilly feel of that sound quality is due to its vector of escaping from the mundane. If those short scores evoke a sense of humor despite such circumstances, it was not rock but the power derived from the prohibition of rock. In other words, there is a strength in something that couldn’t be abandoned despite the compulsion to abandon it.

I once bought the score for [Xenakis’] “Nuits,” a choral piece full of consonants, in a second-hand bookstore in Paris and tried to perform it with Maher Shalal Hash Baz, but, of course, we were laughed at as usual. However, when I came up with the arrangement of dividing the vowels and consonants between male and female voices in Reiko’s “Tiger Lily,” I felt that the situation had somewhat reached the humorous phase you mentioned. The history of underground performance in Japan moves with the coldness of the extreme seriousness and the laughter of nihilism, and I placed myself like a bat, detached from both, so reaching the moment of humor you mentioned had to be through such a route.

Tori Kudo (b. 1958) is a ceramicist, filmmaker, anarchist, and cult icon of Japanese underground music. A skilled pianist and self-taught guitarist, Kudo first trained on a Yamaha pump organ at the age of two-and-a-half before studying jazz piano in his later years. He is best known for his unconstrained experiments with improvisation, naive music, and natural error. In the 1970s and ’80s, Kudo played with a slew of short-lived noise, drone, and psych-punk units, including Guys & Dolls, Noise, Snickers, Sweet Inspirations, and Tokyo Suicide. He is the ringleader of the loosely formed collective Maher Shalal Hash Baz (“the spoil speeds, the prey hastens” in Hebrew), which he began in 1984 with his wife and longtime collaborator Reiko Kudo and the euphonium player Hiro Nakazaki. With a freeform sound and a fluid ensemble of primarily untrained musicians, the collective has produced more than two dozen records under Kudo’s direction. Kudo studied design and pottery in London in the late ’90s, and has produced ceramics for the past two decades.

Sarah Hennies (b. 1979, Louisville, KY) is a composer based in Upstate NY whose work is concerned with a variety of musical, sociopolitical, and psychological issues, including queer & trans identity, psychoacoustics, and the social and neurological conditions underlying creative thought. She is primarily a composer of acoustic ensemble music, but is also active in improvisation, film, and performance art.