NOISE ROOM: Yasuaki Shimizu / Catharina Evens - Support: GAME

Two adventurous musical worlds come together during this RUISKAMER. De Japanse saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu, living legend and cult figure behind the albums ‘Kakashi’ and ‘Utakata No Hibi’, shares the evening with the Brussels pianist and electronics wizard Catharina Evens. Expect an intimate, curious, and layered sound trip in which sax, piano, electronics, and improvisation challenge and embrace each other. De Japanse saxophonist, composer, and producer Yasuaki Shimizu has been active in the music world for almost fifty years. His work moves effortlessly between pop, jazz, minimalism, soundtracks, and pure experiments. He worked with, among others, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Björk, and Van Dyke Parks. Cult albums ‘Kakashi’ and ‘Utakata No Hibi’, masterful crossings of Japanese folk and pop elements, have found a new audience in recent years thanks to reissues on Palto Flats. Due to the refined electronic/disco production style, they sound just as fresh as in the early 80s. After a completely sold-out first North American tour ever in 2025, he is now in our RUISKAMER for the first time, a unique chance to hear and see a living legend up close. Catharina Evens (1997°, Brussels) is a Belgian experimental electro-acoustic pianist who searches for an alternative sound palette for the acoustic piano. She does this, among other things, by manipulating acoustic sounds live via electronics and amplifying them and letting them resonate through the entire sound box and strings of the piano. The typical piano sound, which we usually associate with the acoustic piano, fades and thus makes way for an idiosyncratic sound universe of which she further explores the various musical possibilities via improvisation and composition. Using granular textures, playful capriciousness, compelling pianistic passages, naive phrases, percussive accents, piano preparations, rhythmic sequences, and exploring the playing space between different music genres, Catharina thus creates her own absurd sound world full of narrative fragments. An evening on which two totally different but equally curious musical minds meet. Shimizu’s warm, elastic sax lines and his sense of melodic abstraction find a surprising dialogue with Evens’ hybrid piano world full of resonance, electronics, and improvisation. RUISKAMER as it is intended: close, adventurous, and full of room for discovery.