Music for a multimedia stage production loosely based on Rashomon, a short story about moral ambiguity written in 1915 but based on a thousand-year-old tale from a Japanese collection of thousand-year-old tales. It is far more well-known and celebrated around the world as a classic film by Akira Kurosawa, though he borrowed only the name and a fragment for his story about the subjectivity of memory.
Kuala Lumpur-based Goh Lee Kwang is one of southeast Asia´s most fascinating and prolific multimedia artists. He produced this score for Nyoba Kan, a postmodern dance company that ”showcases ugliness and indecency, while integrating it with philosophies of yoga, Buddhism, qigong, modern dance and other forms in its ongoing meditation on inner wisdom and universal compassion and mercy”. The Lost Testimony of Rashomon proves to have a life beyond the stage, as his ambient soundtrack relates the tale with vibrant detail and great restraint – Goh is otherwise not normally shy about making quite a racket. ´Rain´ and ´The Spirit of Rashomon´ are light and beneficent, but then things turn ugly. ´Masago – Extorting a Confession´ is twelve minutes of deliciously drawn out and tortured tones, death by a thousand cuts in stereo. Goh proceeds to ingeniously harness the muscle of Anglo-European industrial music in order to conjure a coven of ´Witches´ glimpsed distantly across wastelands and through thick fog. ´The Judge´ is a pitch black, unrelenting, stentorian rebuke; finally, a thunderstorm washes it all away.
When listening to music written specifically to accompany images on stage, screen or video monitor, the original story is reduced to fleeting shadows and the music is forced to recall its own version of events. Goh´s recording succeeds admirably as a vivid parallel cinema of sound.
Stephen Fruitman
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