Brava Kilo a.k.a. Brian Kobayakawa is a composer, bassist and producer from Toronto. As a member of The Creaking Tree String Quartet, he released 4 albums, won 4 Canadian Folk Music Awards, and was nominated for 4 JUNO Awards. He’s a busy session bassist, having played on over 100 albums. He tours extensively as a music director and bassist with Serena Ryder.
Annie Sumi is a songwriter and vocalist that takes inspiration from the vast, Canadian landscapes and the collective human experience. She has released 3 albums, toured across North America and Europe, and received nominations from the Canadian Folk Music Awards and Toronto Independent Music Association. Her recent album, Solastalgia, reflects on the environmental decline and the journey toward understanding our place “in the family of things”.
Kilo and Sumi have collaborated to create Kintsugi: an anti-racist, interactive, multi-disciplinary art installation reflecting on racial identity, healing ancestral trauma, and the fragmented history of the Japanese Canadian internment.
Directly confronting the experience of reorienting in a post-internment Canada, Kintsugi brings music into the imposed silence of trauma. At the installation, the audience can pump the foot treadle of the heirloom sewing machine to reveal the hidden depth of the installation: a cycle of songs and videos weaving the past into the present. We’re also releasing this as an EP, beginning with “Chattels,” a song in which every lyric was taken directly from archived documents listing our ancestor’s belongings that were taken from them during internment.
The music video was created in collaboration with shadow puppeteers Mind of a Snail. The animations incorporate a number of documents that were unearthed through the work of Landscapes of Injustice. If you look closely, you can see handwritten letters from our Ancestors, “evacuation” notices, photographs, and correspondence with the Canadian government.
The artists had a handful of family members visit the studio to record the song. For many of them, it was their first experience in a recording studio, and it was also their first time encountering some of these documents. The artist highlights the importance of acknowledging this chapter of their family histories and emphasizes the gravity of the Singer sewing machine, one of very few “chattels” to remain with either family. “Chattels” allowed both Brava Kilo and Annie Sumi to express some of that hurt and contribute to healing some of those ancestral wounds.
Learn more about the installation: https://kintsugi-installation.com/about
For further information on the band, visit the following links:
Instagram | Facebook | Spotify | Apple Music
Image provided courtesy of the artists
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