Okeanos Plus 7 June 2006
Wilton's Music Hall, London
Spitalfields Festival

Peter Grahame Woolf, Musical Pointers [read review in full]

"Last night Okeanos Plus made a huge impression with a concert of "music together" - not "cross-over", which generally entails minuses as well as pluses! This was a complex collaboration between spnm, Asian Music Circuit and Spitalfields Festival....

I fervently hope that there will be an opportunity for audiences farther afield to savour what these adventurous musicians are now doing, and its real originality. Meanwhile, Okeanos Plus should not be missed at City of London Festival on July 7th."


John L Walters - The Guardian (Monday June 12, 2006)

"Okeanos is a new music ensemble that combines Japanese instruments with western strings and woodwinds. The "Plus" part comprises Etsuko Takezawa (who recorded the soundtrack for the bestselling PS2 game Onimusha) and the redoubtable Clive Bell, known for his work with Sylvia Hallett and Jah Wobble.

This gives the young-ish composers featured tonight - all shortlisted by the Society for the Promotion of New Music - a wide-ranging sound palette. Many of the pieces highlight the contrast between the short, spacious sounds of Japanese music and the sustained chords and clusters of winds and bowed strings. Duncan MacLeod, introducing his piece Graffiti, refers to the "gigantic plucking machine" of koto, harp and bass koto that forms a kind of rhythm section to his engaging work; it ends with some of the players switching to singing bowls.

Fragmente 1, by Toshio Hosokawa, is more austere and effective, if a little opaque. There is little rhythm or flow, just isolated clumps of gorgeous timbres for shakuhachi, shamisen and koto.

The largely contemporary programme also includes two classical works. Yachiyojishi is a largely unison duo for shakuhachi and shamisen on which Takezawa also sings; Kumoijishi is a beautiful shakuhachi solo, based around a central melodic motif. Bell, in his rather endearing spoken introductions, explains that "jishi" means lion, and that "it's always good to have a lion in there somewhere".

All the young composers acquit themselves well in writing for this challenging ensemble, though a tendency to overwrite can lead to some raggedness in performance. Basil Athanasiadis's Ithaka was an ingeniously orchestrated, episodic piece, almost comic in places, like the soundtrack to a slo-mo cartoon. Best of all was Hosokawa's Ichie, a solo performance for bass koto and koto that combined written material with improvisation, and was therefore best equipped to respond to the rumbling, low-frequency interruptions of passing Docklands Light Railway trains."