exhibitions

Tori Kudo
Coins (high-pressure economy)

an exhibition of ceramics

Opening Wednesday November 20th 5-8pm

Chris Freeman (Fusetron Sound) & D.O.T. Audio Arts will be playing records

Opening November 20th, 2024 + Closing January 20th, 2025

Please inquire if interested

"I was a builder in Tokyo. One day while digging in the dirt, I came across a layer of white clay and remembered that my father was a potter. I took some of the clay home, hand-built a vessel, put it in a small electric kiln that I borrowed from a local band mate, and fired it on the balcony of my council house. Later, I studied pottery at Barnet College in London, and then moved to Shikoku to take over my father's kiln."

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.