This piece is performed by me and Mark Zurawinski at Silence in Guelph as part of their Shift Series on May 8th, 2016.

More Or Less Cowbell

Sweeping Promises - Cross Me Out
Pylon - Gyrate
WIDOWSPEAK - The Good Ones
Andrew Gabbard - Cloud Of Smoke
ORDER of the TOAD - Do It With Feeling
Homem em Catarse - Hotel Saturnyo
Fuudge - Ju
Corridor - Junior
Hiroki Tanaka - Inori
Rachel Angel - Highway Songs
Kelly Finnigan - I'll Never Love Again Instrumental (Colemine Records)
Bloodshot BILL - One & Own
Nap Eyes - Snake Oil
Nat Birchall - African Village Dance
EEP - Canal
Emma Donovan & The Putbacks - Pink Skirt
Cabaret Voltaire - Just Fascination
-------Part Two------
Death Valley Girls - Hold Your Hand
L.A. WITCH - Dark Horse
Angel Olsen - Too Easy (Bigger Than Us)
Tropical Fuck Storm - Legal Ghost
SYBS - Anwybodaeth (Libertino Records)
Normil Hawaiians - In The Stone
Billy Nomates - Happy Misery
Fever Queen - Night Vision
Dumb Numbers - Goodbye Charlie
El Grupo Folclórico - Tamba (ANALOG AFRICA)
UAY - El Barco
Holy Motors - Endless Night
Spacemoth - Asking For You
Josephine Foster - Freemason Drag
Black Pumas - Politicians In My Eyes
Death - Politicians In My Eyes

Pressure Drop Show, August 31st 2020

Death Valley Girls - Under The Spell Of Joy 
Body Double - Embrace The Bomb 
Germ House - Nothing Is Like They Wanted
CAN - I'm So Green 
SAULT - The Beginning & The End
Enrique Nicolas Noviello - Tiburon
Sweet Chap - Plead
Edgar Breau - Shout About It
Pigalle Connection - Vendetta James 
The Quiet Ones - Ninguem
SUUNS - Pray 
Mother Tongues - Everything You Wanted
The William Loveday Intention - Celebrating Weakness
Funeral Lakes - Power Trip
Hiroki Tanaka - Eternal Host
Molchat Doma - Ne Smeshno
Rory Gallagher - Laundromat

Pressure Drop Show, 21st September 2020

When I first started thinking about this project, my sister had already recorded a lot of my grandmother talking and singing folk songs or hymns. My sister sent me the recording of my grandmother singing “Jesus Tender Shepherd Hear Me”, and I suppose I felt inspired to create something about this experience based on that recording. 

Bare Hallways was written as I was reflecting on my experience as a caregiver for my grandmother, and the feeling that everything was slowly falling apart. My grandmother’s Alzheimer’s was inevitably growing worse, the house was falling into disrepair, and the family had started the very necessary process of clearing out what items they could get away with, without sending my grandmother into a panic. 

There’s this dichotomy between the menial and tender tasks that were required of me as a caregiver in the verses, and then the refrain of the chorus “In The End”. I think I couldn’t look away at the truth of it, that death is isolating and painful. That there was an inevitable ugliness to it that you needed to accept. 

A lot of this album is about confronting the difficult aspects of dying, and attempting to find grace and solace in the pain that death causes.

Bare Hallways

Hiroki’s debut solo album “Kaigo Kioku Kyoku” speaks to the celebration of brightness, while reckoning with darkness. 

“Kaigo Kioku Kyoku”, which translates into “Caregiving Memory Songs” in Japanese, is the culmination of his two-year long experience as a live-in caregiver for both his grandmother with Alzheimer’s and his uncle with terminal cancer. 

In a further nod to the circular nature of life, the house in which Hiroki cared for his relatives was also the one he was born in. Combining the sounds of objects collected from the house, voice recordings of his relatives, and structuring the songs off of hymns and Japanese folk songs, Hiroki has created a “sonic archive” to preserve his unique family history, and document the stark reality of being a caregiver. 

 “I wanted to create a sonic archive of the space that had provided me life, and served as space for transformation and shedding. I wanted to provide a voice that I hadn’t heard before, one that illustrated the experience of being a caregiver in stark detail. I wanted to create an album that celebrated my family's multicultural heritage and created a snapshot of a family's history.”

Kaigo Kioku Kyoku

Snowdrops


https://linktr.ee/hirokikyoku

Musician and poet writing about his experience as a caregiver for his grandmother and uncle who both suffered from terminal illnesses. 

Snowdrops

Hiroki Tanaka

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