Articles
Relay Column: On What We Incorporate & Fashion (Yuri Umemoto)
PROFILE
Yuri Umemoto
Composer. Born in Tokyo in 2002. Exploring a maximalistic musicality that draws from traditional sheet music and modern digital expressions, with a focus on sound expression in Japanese anime and MAD sampling techniques found in internet culture. His works have been performed by domestic and international performers, ensembles, and orchestras, and showcased at music festivals in Europe. He also provides music for fashion shows and television programs, collaborating with visual artists.
I have a strong desire to incorporate things I find beautiful into myself. Fragrant things are inhaled into the body, sounds draw my ear, and beautiful objects are placed beside me. For some, love reaches a boundary marked by merging with the body. For me, fashion is a forcefully alluring means to realize such a desire for unity. Merging requires strength, and it can sometimes turn into love or violence.
When an artist encounters something and treats it as their own, what kind of power is at play? Adorning oneself with the designs of others or other cultures, mastering people, creatures, or objects. In the midst of vague good and evil, the self-questioning continues.
As a composer, I constantly ponder this issue when creating music or artistic works. In creation, something is "incorporated" as "material." Operating within the context of traditional European art, I sometimes, as a non-European, can bring something from the outside world. When we incorporate the representation of a particular country, culture, or community into our art—as voices are snatched, traced, and brought into a different world. Voices are sampled, notated as sheet music, and performed for a specific world.
Incorporating things can become fashion. Just as some high school boys express themselves through the rap beef they encounter, what individuals find appealing can manifest as clothing that is superficially discernible. People wear T-shirts of rock bands they know nothing about, and uncultured bourgeois attend classical music concerts with no interest, flaunting their social status. They adorn themselves without any intention of using a skateboard, wearing "THRASHER" caps, clutching pristine decks as if they were shopping carts.
Adorning oneself to become someone, wearing clothes, dyeing hair, listening to music, reading books, watching films, participating in sports, building relationships with others—whether it’s superficial love or forcefully incorporating something for a reason—boasting about a large bookshelf—thick novels, academic books they’ve never read—showing off in the study of a pompous university professor—upper-class accents, rich homes—grand pianos that are never played, art pieces that hold no appeal—big-logo high-end brand T-shirts, flaunting beautiful lovers.
To be incorporate and become one's own. For someone like me, who creates, the fascinating aspect of fashion lies in its ability to be self-expression while being imitated based on varying degrees of influence. When attempting to resolutely deviate from that repetition, one stands at the gateway of "creation." For me, that was music. The act of imitation exists fractally, but attempting to impart difference to the world can be called "creation" in any form. Living is inherently about difference, and one could just as well proclaim here the cliché that living is creating.
I enjoy imitating in fashion. Designed clothing communicates a completed form of self-expression and style, and the combinations produce a multitude of interpretations. As is well-known, creating is not limited to producing something from scratch. God created the heavens and the earth, and what was shaped sows the seeds. In terms of music, the creator isn't limited to what is commonly referred to as a "composer"; figures such as DJs who combine and build upon existing works are also creators. Similarly, in fashion, our actions of "coordinating" ready-made clothes can also be seen as true "creation." What lies between a creator attempting to make something from 'nothing' and a composer blending existing elements is the difference in depth of stepping into the profound pit of possibilities that is "nothing."
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