Katanoise

I didn’t know that composer and friend Yann Robin was a black belt in judo. Judo is such an essential part of his life that he came up with a project in which five composers, including myself, would set five judo kata to music. Kata are codified and choreographed movements representing different martial arts techniques. In judo, there are seven Kata. Each composer chooses a Kata from five selected by Yann. From this selection, I wanted to set to music the Goshin Jitsu no Kata (self-defence Kata), which is the most recent (1956) and has the particularity of being performed with weapons (dagger, stick and pistol).
Katanoise’s score is intimately connected to the movements of the judokas, both during the performance of the figures and during the ritual extension of what happens between the 21 techniques presented. She proposes a fairly minimalist material associated with the three weapons in different typologies: stick / harmonic and vertical material, dagger / horizontal and noisy material, pistol / percussive material. For the first series of attacks, the music alternates between the kata and the replacements. The last series, which involves self-defence in the face of pistol attacks, sees the music become more autonomous, in a kind of disjointed walking, a reference to Japanese film noirs of the 1950s.