Sound Experience, Feeling Sound: Alan Nakagawa and the Point Of Turn Project
Point of Turn emerged from an invitation by Prospect Art to the sound artist Alan Nakagawa. The project is conceived to invite individuals to share their stories of themselves or someone they know leaving organized religion, shaping the results into a sound composition. Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter was invited to consult, converse, and write about the project as it developed and was completed. As the Point of Turn project synopsis describes, “The framework of the work is an analog stretching (inspired by data stretching) of the verse and chorus of 1970s pop hit ‘I’m Not In Love’ by 10CC. Working with vocalists Evelyn Davis and Steven Speciale, Nakagawa recorded them singing the chromatic scale. Then he used those recordings to form the chords used in the 10CC song and constructed an elongated choral work using those recordings. The various anonymous stories Prospect Art collected through an open call have been folded into the choral tracks. Also added into the work are frequency clusters from Royal Rife’s scientific experiments of the 1930s. This drone-like sound recording was then mixed to be experienced as a vibratory sound experience.”
I.
On a summer day in the 1970s in L.A., something happened to Alan Nakagawa. Alan was 5 years old, living in K-town and enjoying recess during a break from kindergarten class. He was looking up at the sky in the playground at Wilton Place Elementary School and heard the sound of four or five notes. He could hear them, but he couldn’t see where they were coming from. And he thought, Now where is that coming from?! In that moment he realized the sound he heard was coming from within his own head – and, more importantly -- that he could control those sounds. As Nakagawa reflected later, we human beings can make decisions about what’s in our heads – about the sounds we generate. And, as Nakagawa says it has been for himself: a whole life’s work may be based upon listening.
Point of Turn is interdisciplinary sound artist Alan Nakagawa’s latest work. Produced in collaboration with Prospect Art, it is an ebbing and flowing, sometimes startling, sometimes surging sound composition of a little over 30 minutes in length. It all began with a simple, powerful premise: what if we ask people who were a part of organized religion, and then left religion, to give their story of that departure – in 3 sentences? Meanwhile, what if a context could be provided in which people could speak and listen to accounts of those moments? What might all that sound like? How might it be to enter a soundscape composed with elements of, and related to, such powerful, turning-point experiences?
The motivation to explore these issues was not primarily abstract or experimental but, rather, issued directly out of particular friendships. Many of Alan’s friends, like many others, grew up within a particular organized religion but then, common in a secular or pluralistic context, left their religion. These stories of leaving sounded important, dramatic, impactful. As Alan reports, he grew up in a nominally religious context as an agnostic and did not have organized religion as an integral part of his own story. Meanwhile, as he observes, religion has played an important role for many Asian Americans as their ancestors came to America from Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and elsewhere. As artist-in-residence of the Pasadena Buddhist Temple, Nakagawa has observed directly both the integral role the religious community plays for participants and also the decline in, and dearth of, participation among younger generations.
What’s happened with people and religion in America (and elsewhere)? What’s going on these days? What’s essential in the midst of things? What does the future look like for living communities? In Point of Turn, Nakagawa offers listeners a portal into a powerful, encompassing soundscape that incorporates simple reportage of individual testimonies within a complex, multilayered sound experience that accumulates, circles around, and persistently lingers on in mind.
II.
Another important starting point for Alan was at the age of 14 or 15. Jazz pianist and composer Horace Tapscott invited him to a professional music studio and, as he reports, “it changed my life.” Nakagawa experiences Tinnitus, which consists of “high register sustained tones” that are for him not painful and “[never] so loud that it’s physically hampering.” Along the way, he made the discovery that “making music is like sculpture” and “recording is like painting.” He discovered experimental music. He became influenced by ambient music. Brian Eno, Philip Glass, and Laurie Anderson, among others such as Michael Brewster, Karleheinz Stockhausen, and Edgar Varese, appear on Nakagawa’s list of influences, along with the polyrhythms of Indian dance and music. A secret of sorts for Nakagawa’s method has been to bring ambiance and sound into control, to capture it, compose with it, and then present the results.
Music is one thing, and sound is another. Definitive for Nakagawa’s work have been at least two aspects that are not contained by music: the recorded and the tactile. As he describes it, he creates “semi-autobiographic sound-architecture / tactile sound experiences, utilizing multi-point audio field recordings of historic interiors.” These works have included Peace Resonance: Hiroshima / Wendover (2018-2021) and Conical Sound: Antoni Gaudi and Simon Rodia (2018), which include on-the-ground field recordings at monumental, significant sites such as Hiroshima Atomic Dome and Sagrada Familia that are then composed for and experienced by participants moving through a given space, including locations in Los Angeles (Human Resources; Japanese American National Museum) and Washington D.C. (Hirshhorn Museum). Participants may be given earplugs and/or a balloon as they move through a space as ways to facilitate a haptic experience. Nakagawa has also worked with the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and with Gallaudet University, Katherine Ott, and the Smithsonian Museum of American History on the history of the hearing aid in the United States. As an interdisciplinary sound artist, Nakagawa often works closely with communities in a recording-documenting-archiving process, while also asking the question, “How could I use sound in an effective way, a tactile way?”
In Point of Turn, Nakagawa continues this body of work, building, varying, and experimenting with a few things as he goes along. The semi-autobiographical aspect expands to include the short biographies of those who submitted their three-sentence stories of departure from their religion. He experiments with the phenomenology of polyrhythm as it is communicated just through tones, simply through frequencies or sound waves. In the past, he has incorporated voice to some extent, but this is the first time his sound work is primarily based on the human voice. Several submissions of stories were turned in by participants as audio files; for those that weren’t, Nakagawa recruited a cast of willing narrators to recite the submitted texts. Meanwhile, Nakagawa enlisted vocalists Evelyn Davis and Steven Speciale, in order to create an original database of notes. First, Nakagawa played the note on the keyboard. Then the singer sang the note. Nakagawa recorded it; and one by one a range of 20 notes – “20 distinct performances” – generated the chromatic scale to then play from.
Immediate inspiration for the Point of Turn composition comes from the old pop song by the 10CCs, “I’m Not In Love,” which Nakagawa calls the first ambient piece, pre-dating Eno’s “Music for Airports”; from Balinese monkey chanting; and from toning and harmonizing rhythm as found in Philip Glass. Nakagawa employs a vocoder he purchased earlier this year specifically for this project, and he assembles multiple patches in a way that mimics pop tunes – then elongates it through multitrack recording. The mixing of the popular and the unusual is inspired in part by his time living in Japan from 1988-1990. Among many things during that time he was especially taken by the immediacy of Indian rhythms and music. Once, at the time, someone asked about a particular song, “Is that a religious or secular song?” The reply came back, “Religious or secular – what’s that?”
Alan says mine is a “typical American agnostic story.” “My grandmother was Shinto,” and “my grandfather was Buddhist, but not religious.” Pictures of his ancestors hung on the wall as a matter of course, but nothing especially significant was made of it. His family didn’t normally go to services. “We showed up at the temple only when someone was married or died.” So, “I grew up in a semi-Buddhist/Shinto family. My best friend in Middle School was Jewish. The school was called Founders School, which was founded by a Religious Science Church, Founders Church. The school rented the classrooms at the Hollywood Jewish Temple. I went to High School at Daniel Murphy High School, [an all-boys Dominican] Catholic school. …[But my immediate involvement was very] limited and always as a non-practitioner.” In the post-WWII Japanese-American Buddhist community in Pasadena where Alan is in his 4th year as artist-in-residence, members there have observed a formidable decrease in membership, and there has been little recruitment for new members. Older members ask, How can we get people back (to the temple)? Older people who are now 70 to 90 years of age want the temple to survive so, for instance, they can be buried there.
Alan makes it clear, “I’m not Buddhist. I’m the pagan in the house.” By his own admission, the closest he’s got to the teachings of Buddhism comes through Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. But he wonders out loud, Have we lost something that religion provided? For Nakagawa, and many others, including friends, family, and the public at large, it raises the crucial question of what brings about someone leaving a religion.
III.
Back in the early 1990s, a whole lot of people had an REM song stuck in their heads: “Losing My Religion.” Over approximately the last three decades since then, there has been an overall decline in participation in organized religion in developed countries including the United States (while participation has risen in the global south). Much has been made of the idea in America and beyond of being “spiritual but not religious.” Much also may be made of many associated terms: religion, religions, spiritual, secular, faith, belief, supernatural, paranormal, ideological, and so on. What particularly stands out within the general statistical trends are the particular individual moments when there was a definitive turn from participation from “inside” to “outside” a religion. Sometimes those moments seem to be quite matter of fact and uneventful, but often they are emotional, sometimes highly so.
Each story is singular, but there are patterns. For some, a turn from religion is a single, solitary moment like a lightning strike. For others, the turn is the cumulative effect of years, the “straws” building up on the camel until the last one becomes definitive. Talk about religion is notoriously difficult because it is complicated and also because language about it is often characterized by both “ambiguity” and “plurality.” Someone says the word “religion” or uses a term from a religion, and it becomes like a Rorschach ink blot, letting people make the meaning they will from it. Yet commonly most of us think we have a pretty clear idea of what someone means when they say they were raised in religion and then left it.
And so what is left? One participant in the Point of Turn project, we learn through the narration, risked leaving everyone they knew: “…I was very afraid to leave. I was afraid of my father, I was afraid of being disfellowshipped. Being disfellowshipped is a high price to pay for leaving the community. You’re completely cut off from everyone you knew and grew up with.” Among many reasons for leaving, individuals may leave behind certain ideas, practices, or emotions. They may leave a certain organization or set of organizations, culture, and/or particular relationships. Some may leave one religion for another. But the subjects of Point of Turn left all religion(s). We may automatically think that they became “secular,” but that’s not necessarily a label that is instinctive for everyone, nor is any particular label automatic. For some who leave religion, the sense of freedom or liberation extends to dropping any labels that seem to, once again, be trying to “bind” one up.
The Latin roots of that word “religion” are associated with “binding” and “bonding.” And when people leave their religion, a question can arise as to what remnants there may be. What analogous practices could be operating in the new secular, non-religious, or a-religious context? Alan gets at this when he has suggested a number of times during several conversations that perhaps bringing the many testimonies of people’s turn from religion all together in one project and sharing them in a deliberate, mindful, composed way could perhaps be a kind of “religious” experience? “Religious” here could be synonymous with “spiritual” or – pick your term – sublime? awe-inspiring? amazing? marvel-ous? In any case: deeply, affectively moving.
The deeply moving is a core of any reflection on a “turn.” Reflection on a turn, turns, or turning ties into some of the most fundamental thinking in at least the West, if not also in the Islamic world and, broadly, across the globe. The rhetoric of turning touches upon the realities of “conversion” and “transformation,” whether in evangelical senses or much more widely, in natural, psychological, and cosmological senses. Along with conversions, there can be de-conversions; and transformations sometimes take place in opposite directions. When I think of an individual turn or transformation, I quickly think of it potentially taking place along three lines: ideational (or intellectual), behavioral (or ethical), and/or emotional (or affective). In other words, what does a person think, do, and feel? And how does what a person thinks, does, and feels change?
The emotional/affective aspect has the most impact, and this is what Nakagawa’s project is so effective at facilitating and empowering. “Turn, turn, turn,” sings the old 1960s Byrds song, drawing upon the lyrics of the Book of Ecclesiastes, “…to everything there is a season.” One of the amazing things to consider about some forms of turn is that not only do they keep going, but they also are layered: as in a spiral. Something is lost or left behind and something else is found and gained. Meanwhile, some things seem to come back around again, but then we find we’re in a new spot – maybe a “higher” spot than we were previously? Or maybe simply “altered”? In a turn, one may ascend, descend, and/or veer into another. Yet, however we speculate, we know for some people there’s a final moment just before they leave their religion. Nakagawa sought to capture this moment poetically.
IV.
What if we could capture those three sentences – those three sentences not unlike Nakagawa’s Haiku project (Social Distancing, Haiku and You, Orange County Museum of Art, 2020) – and let those words speak for themselves? Importantly, the articulated departure isn’t necessarily a loss of spirituality, though it could be; rather, it’s a loss of organized religion. To get this right, Prospect Art put out a call not unlike Elizabeth Withstandley’s Collective Distance project (2020) or Gioj DeMarco’s The Collective Dreamworld Project (with Loris D'Acunto, ongoing) that sought to solicit worldwide, anonymous responses from people, in this case, to provide an option to record their own audio account, or to type in their text account, all within a genuine and safe context. To some extent, then a starting point for the project is not only poetic but also ethnographic or phenomenological – simply recording, or making a document of what happened to people, what was said, simply presenting what’s there.
So then with the question being roughly, What’s the last thing that happened before you left your religion? the responses were anticipated to be profoundly personal and/or ethically based. Perhaps there could be policy differences or cultural differences that led to a split. What’s planned then in the end is a live presentation given in 2023 in Los Angeles. “The audience will be given ear plugs and a balloon to inflate and carry around a space equipped with speakers able to project audible and subsonic sound waves. An ASL interpreter will also be present during the course of the half-hour sound work.” The central effort of the project then is: how to communicate “the moment” of the turn through a soundscape, perhaps a soundscape that is “angelic”?
When individuals began to make submissions of their three sentences, Alan was impressed by the “private, intimate, and honest memories” they were sharing. “The depths and weight, of these collectively, is intense.” At the time, he reflected, “In some cases, there’s a flat-out disbelief of the dogma of organized religion. In some cases, there’s a sense of futility. [And there’s] a sense of letting go, a change of sorts followed by the decision to leave.”
V.
The piece begins, then, with deep, rapid, guttural rumblings. To describe the initial sounds is to lose them, but we sense something is coming from we know not where. Is there an incoming helicopter army or an alien spacecraft coming in from the distance? Something powerful, possibly aggressive, is coming – and it’s almost impossible to listen to: it’s painful to the system, rattling the brain – then, quickly, some easing comes. A first speaker speaks: strong, professional, polished – as if to say, This indeed is a work. You unmistakably are listening here to a very deliberately crafted piece: “I must have been 14 and had heard about pantheism….” The rapid-fire grinding continues as the narrator tells us about a dismissive priest. As Nakagawa explains, for approximately the first 2 minutes “frequencies and clusters” are “dominant.” High-pitched, piercing tones come in as if to “get all of our equipment” tuned in right for the performance to come.
The high, sustained tones press hard and physically hurt. But then quickly some relief immediately begins to emerge through another higher tone. By the one-minute mark, again something-from-somewhere-else is coming onto the “scene”: another “army”? a “choir” of drones? a galvanic “storm” or hyper-charged system of some kind coming across the horizon? But then – back to the immediate present – a next narrator, plainly spoken, snaps us back to the current matter at hand: “The spiritual leader of my church was diagnosed with cancer…” and, she shares, the next leader in line was passed over because “she was a Transwoman.” Subtly, the sounds of something-from-somewhere slowly, progressively shapeshift to a feeling of a choir and a church organ, merged into an increasingly pleasant, synthetic drone. Deep, pulsating moments punctuate in the background, then drop away. Feedback tone. Synthesized voice choir rises. Feedback, increase, pain.
Queue narrator: “When I was in high school, my mother told my sister and I during High Holy Days….” This is the third narrator in a series of approximately 10 throughout the composition. (One of the accounts told here, we’ll learn late in the piece is of an individual escaping across the mountains from the Nazis during WWII.) As she speaks, the sound of a full digital choir enters, full power: a sustained chord of recorded human voices presenting at full strength. In the foreground, we hear about an argument and the fact that the mother “has been unobservant ever since.” Then all words drop away and the “angelic choir” gains strength, coming fully into the foreground. Lower tones complement the higher ones. No matter what anyone makes of the particulars of any of the given stories here, at least one absolutely clear message seems to be emerging: that whatever is happening here is profound, and it is large.
And so forth: read testimony (“I witnessed a houseless person being violently thrown out of the church….”), hear the “angels” singing, alternate foregrounding words, then song, “silence” of verbal statement, then testimony of departure moments. At around the 4-minute mark, the sustained synthesizer choir is starting to take hold of me, something that really takes over for me about halfway through the composition – near the middle point.
If by the 5-minute mark, we think we’ve settled into a pattern for the composition, we’d be wrong. Alan has shared that he does conceive of the piece to some extent to include “compositions within the composition,” mapping at roughly 5 minutes or so each – the idea being that some listeners or participants may dip in and out of a 30+ minute composition. At around 6 minutes, an entirely different voice enters. Seemingly out of nowhere a “robot” (or alien?) voice begins, “When I was 6, I remember being told….” The insertion of such a voice is instantaneously provocative. Is it the robot that has experienced what is being said? Or rather is someone else’s experience maybe being “translated” through the machine? Who is the being for which this voice speaks? No matter what or who it may be, this voice comes from an altered sense of existence.
“One by one I dismissed each belief statement….” “I was reading about natural selection….” The ascent of the choir grows. “At age 7, I lied about accepting….” It goes without saying that we each have our different hearings of things, but as we move through this soundscape an ambiguity emerges for me in this choir: to what extent, or not, does the choir sing “praise”? If there is celebration and reverence of the accompanying testimonies – is there? – is there also irony? Does the text of what each person is saying go with the choir – or are they contrasted? In the space between what each person has truly experienced, the narration, and the “angelic choir,” is there some “blame,” some criticism, some judgment? I confess to my own wondering about an ironic effect of the heavenly choir, almost like, “Oh yeah, what a revelation!” mockingly. Do I detect spoof and playful buoyancy in the midst of this profound whirlpool? No matter how each listener/reader answers that question, at least one thing stands out to me as particularly clear: Point of Turn is not didactic; as a sophisticated creation, it reflects and simulates the appropriate ambiguity and plurality of the subjects at hand.
By 9 minutes, there’s a growing sense of deep emergence, a cumulative effect, a ramping up, a growing sense. “Simple” reportage is laid over a massive soundscape context. Repetition of text recapitulates the given moment offered. Statements that can’t help but shock, do shock. The robot/alien (Vocoder) returns. This superficially “intrusive” voice is instantly persuasive, inviting/friendly, and I start to be taken in by the robot/alien. Is this voice from somewhere else? A.I.? Is it translating some unknown language? Grief, abuse, fundamental lies, and truth are brought to the fore. By around 12 minutes, I’m really starting to settle into Nakagawa’s sound cosmos. That ‘heavenly drone’ is coming over me a bit, getting a glint of trance going. The narrations and the pacing work especially well for me here. Around 14 minutes, I’m feeling that ecstatic sense – a ‘speaking in tongues’ ‘mass choir’ sense, where there are no words, no speaking, only feeling, but in a very physical, haptic sense. Here, Point of Turn moves into the ecstatic.
VI.
And there’s an opportunity here. Do we listeners “get it”? The grief, the pain, the lies, in the context of the truth of our lived experience, is here in this moment. We’ve entered a “portal” into others’ existence, which also is, in shared measure, our own. We’re being moved. From a higher place toward a higher place. Nothing can stand up to the blitz of sheer reality in a given moment such as this one. There’s an opportunity for release. Relief and release into an exalted harmony. A sense that everything, and everything that has ever been, is ok. That things that are not okay has been identified and, at least partially, been dealt with. And that there’s a sense of all of it – ok and not ok – being part of a larger flow, a Niagara of sound, issuing forth in its natural, all-encompassing power. As I listen to this, I have a sense of the flow of energy coming right out of the top of my head. Ecstatic.
Then quickly back to mundane reality. A pastor. A sermon. Tithing one’s money. After the romance of ecstasy, we always come back to the humdrum of pragmatic reality. Shame. Ostracization. Differences in values. These everyday realities are no less felt. Then, suddenly, a voice says, “Misogyny….” “…Misogyny.” It’s kind of easy to drop this word in here in the middle of all this, yet – when it all comes down, no other word (and reality) perhaps could be more right on. Misogyny is a primary reason for departure for many people (including men) from organized religion.
How do we people/all endure? How do we emerge? How do we reconcile ourselves to others, very significant others, in our lives? Feedback. Sustenance by a choir we know not the source of. Endurance. Strange hints of sounds of something completely different from what we know. Hardship. Exaltation. Could it be that, in some religious terms, “everything that is, is holy”? Do we 21st-century moderns now exist in our own space-age version of Dante’s cosmology? Perhaps more like Star Wars (or Star Trek)? Tarkovsky’s Solaris? Quantum something? We think we’re too big for all that, but humans have been surprised so many times. Point of Turn is asking us to consider. To consider all this. Consider through listening. Consider. Consider. Consider through listening. Consider how it feels. Consider this feeling. Consider this experience. Consider the sound of this. As Point of Turn closes, we set back into the massive, sustained context for anything that was ever done by anyone, anything that was ever said or not said, done and not done. And we return to the particular, actual things said and done in given moments such as “…I was pushed out.” “I felt the need to do what everyone else was doing.”
VII.
In conversation, Nakagawa has noted that religion and the loss of religion are integral to the Asian-American experience. He notes that the Buddhist center where he is artist-in-residence is more like a community center. One primary activity of the center happens on Tuesdays when the sewing club makes lunch for the maintenance crew, and everyone eats lunch together collectively. Of course eating lunch together like this is not like getting together with friends at a restaurant. Somehow everyone knows that this is a place where they could be buried if they want to, if the center survives. “I want to be a player in Asian-American futurism,” says Alan. “…I don’t know what that is yet.” Part of whatever that imagined future is seems to include the possibilities of technologies that come to exist and then re-order society, the dreams of science fiction coming to beneficial fruition. Part of whatever that future is seems to include some form of laboratory for dialogue. In whatever form it takes, we can be certain we’ll hear it and feel it. Whatever it ends up being, Nakagawa has in mind: “I would like to participate in building that future.”
Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter. 2022.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to Gioj De Marco for inviting me into this project. Thank you to Gioj, Alan, Elizabeth Withstandley, and others who joined us in lively, careful, thoughtful, productive conversation and feedback. A special thanks to those who shared their stories for this project.
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REFERENCES
Opening summary: “As the Point of Turn project synopsis describes”: Alan Nakagawa, Point of Turn project description, 09 July 2022, adapted.Section I: “As Nakagawa reflected later…”: conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, Elizabeth Withstandley, and public (Los Angeles, California; Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and elsewhere, via Zoom, 04 March 2022). “And, as Nakagawa says”: Conversation with Alan Nakagawa (Los Angeles, California, and Berkley, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 July 2022). Cf. Annette Lareau, Listening to People (University of Chicago Press, 2021); Zaid Fahmy, Street Sounds (Stanford University Press, 2020). “…give their story of that departure – in 3 sentences?”: Point of Turn project description, 09 July 2022; this includes primary accounts of an individual’s own departure from organized religion and also some accounts of those that people know, i.e., of another individual’s departure. “Many of Alan’s friends…” ff.: conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, and Elizabeth Withstandley (Los Angeles, California, and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 January 2022).Section II:“Another important starting point…then present the results”: conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, Elizabeth Withstandley, and public (Los Angeles, California; Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and elsewhere, via Zoom, 04 March 2022); conversation with Alan Nakagawa (Los Angeles, California, and Berkley, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 July 2022); communication with Alan Nakagawa (07 August 2022); see also David W. Samuels, Louise Meintjes, Ana Maria Ochoa, and Thomas Porcello, “Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010): 329-345. “As he describes it…’a tactile way’: biography of Alan Nakagawa, Artist, 2022 (https://www.alannakagawa.com/about); Work, Alan Nakagawa, Sound Artist, Etc. (https://www.alannakagawa.com/); and conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, Elizabeth Withstandley, and public (Los Angeles, California; Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and elsewhere, via Zoom, 04 March 2022); see also Artbound, “Alan Nakagawa’s ‘Conical Sound’,” clip 7m 49s, aired 09/16/2014, PBS SoCal / KCET (https://www.pbs.org/video/alan-nakagawas-conical-sound/) and Alan Nakagawa, AIR Head (Writ Large Press, 2022 forthcoming). “He experiments with the phenomenology of polyrhythm…the chromatic scale to then play from”: conversation with Alan Nakagawa (Los Angeles, California, and Berkley, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 July 2022); stories include those of others that individuals know that left their religion; Alan adds: “This is the closest I’ve ever gotten to creating a choral-like work”: comments from Alan Nakagawa (25 Aug 2022). “Immediate inspiration…what’s that?”: conversation with Alan Nakagawa (Los Angeles, California, and Berkley, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 July 2022); comments from Alan Nakagawa (25 Aug 2022); and conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, and Elizabeth Withstandley (Los Angeles, California, and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 January 2022). "10CC, I'm Not In Love, (1975)": uploaded by Moon doggy 12 Feb 2017 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgJckGsR-T0); “Brian Eno - Ambient 1: Music for Airports [Full Album]” [1978]: uploaded by Methadone Methadone 30 September 2016 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNwYtllyt3Q). “Balinese Monkey Chant”: uploaded by siberio55 21 December 2009 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acXD-jqW9_o). “Alan says, mine is…be buried there”: conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, Elizabeth Withstandley, and public (Los Angeles, California; Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and elsewhere, via Zoom, 04 March 2022); communication with Alan Nakagawa (26 March 2022); and conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, and Elizabeth Withstandley (Los Angeles, California, and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 January 2022). “Alan makes it clear…someone leaving a religion”: conversation with Alan Nakagawa (Los Angeles, California, and Berkley, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 July 2022); conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, Elizabeth Withstandley, and public (Los Angeles, California; Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and elsewhere, via Zoom, 04 March 2022); Conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, and Elizabeth Withstandley (Los Angeles, California, and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 January 2022); cf. James J. O’Donnell, Pagans (HarperCollins, 2015). Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind (Shambala, 1970/2020).Section III:R.E.M. - Losing My Religion (Official Music Video): uploaded by remhq 11 July 2011 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwtdhWltSIg). “Over approximately the last three decades…global south”: Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2011); cf. Pew Research Center, The Future of World Religions: Population Growth Projects, 2010-2050, Conrad Hackett, Demographer (2015) (https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/04/02/religious-projections-2010-2050/). “…a last one becomes definitive”: conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, and Elizabeth Withstandley (Los Angeles, California, and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 January 2022). “‘ambiguity’ and ‘plurality’”: David Tracy, Plurality & Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (University of Chicago Press, 1987); cf. Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter, Explaining Jesus: An Interdisciplinary Exploration of a Phenomenon (Lexington Books / Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). “…I was very afraid to leave”: transcript, Point of Turn / Edited (07/01/22), item #9. “Among many reasons for leaving…automatic”: conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, Elizabeth Withstandley, and public (Los Angeles, California; Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and elsewhere, via Zoom, 04 March 2022); cf. Phil Zuckerman, Living the Secular Life (Penguin, 2014). “Alan gets at this…”: e.g., conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, Elizabeth Withstandley, and public (Los Angeles, California; Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and elsewhere, via Zoom, 04 March 2022). “a turn…cosmological senses”: see Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (University of California Press, 1950/1969); The Rhetoric of Religion (University of California Press, 1961/1970); and Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter, “Still the King of Queens? Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion, and the Theorizing of Rhetoric and Religion Now,” in Kenneth Burke and His Circles, edited by J. Selzer and R. Wess, 161-173 (Parlor Press, 2008). “When I think of…emotional (or affective)”: Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter, Death in Documentaries: The Memento Mori Experience (Brill/Rodopi, 2018). “The Byrds - Turn! Turn! Turn!” uploaded by embryonicsoul 18 June 2008 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4ga_M5Zdn4). “…in a spiral…poetically”: conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, and Elizabeth Withstandley (Los Angeles, California, and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 January 2022).Section IV:“…solicit worldwide, anonymous responses…presenting what’s there”: conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, and Elizabeth Withstandley (Los Angeles, California, and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 January 2022). “So then…‘angelic’”: conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, and Elizabeth Withstandley (Los Angeles, California, and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 January 2022); Point of Turn project description, 09 July 2022; and conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, Elizabeth Withstandley, and public (Los Angeles, California; Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and elsewhere, via Zoom, 04 March 2022). “At the time, he reflected…‘decision to leave’”: communication with Alan Nakagawa (26 March 2022). Section V:“A first speaker speaks…deliberately crafted piece”: conversation with Alan Nakagawa (Los Angeles, California, and Berkley, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 July 2022). “I must have been 14 and had heard about pantheism….”: transcript, Point of Turn / Edited (07/01/22), item #14. “frequencies and clusters…dominant”: conversation with Alan Nakagawa (Los Angeles, California, and Berkley, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 July 2022). “The spiritual leader of my church…a Transwoman”: transcript, Point of Turn / Edited (07/01/22), item #18. “When I was in high school, my mother told my sister and I during High Holy Days….”: transcript, Point of Turn / Edited (07/01/22), item #16. “One of the accounts…WWII”: transcript, Point of Turn / Edited (07/01/22), item #20. “has been unobservant ever since”: transcript, Point of Turn / Edited (07/01/22), item #16. “I witnessed a houseless person being violently thrown out of the church….”: transcript, Point of Turn / Edited (07/01/22), item #17. “Alan has shared…a 30+ minute composition”: conversation with Alan Nakagawa (Los Angeles, California, and Berkley, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 July 2022). “When I was 6, I remember being told….”: transcript, Point of Turn / Edited (07/01/22), item #8. “One by one I dismissed each belief statement…I was reading about natural selection…At age 7, I lied about accepting….”: transcript, Point of Turn / Edited (07/01/22), items #27 & #19 & #4. “I’m feeling that ecstatic sense…haptic sense”: communication, Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter with Alan Nakagawa (07 July 2022).Section VI:“portal”: conversation with Alan Nakagawa (Los Angeles, California, and Berkley, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 July 2022). “Misogyny….”: transcript, Point of Turn / Edited (07/01/22), item #26, replicated. “everything that is, is holy”: Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions, 1961/1972); cf. Allen Ginsberg, “Footnote to Howl” [1955] from Collected Poems 1947-1980 (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54163/footnote-to-howl); and “Patti Smith - Spell (Footnote to Howl) (2000/06/23)” uploaded by Andrei Ionescu (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaY7P4kqxCw). “…I was pushed out” and “I felt the need to do what everyone else was doing”: transcript, Point of Turn / Edited (07/01/22), items #25 & #3. Section VII:“Nakagawa has noted…integral to Asian-American experience”: conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, and Elizabeth Withstandley (Los Angeles, California, and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 January 2022). “He notes the Buddhist center…everyone eats lunch together collectively”: conversation with Alan Nakagawa (Los Angeles, California, and Berkley, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 July 2022). “I want to be a player in Asian-American futurism…I don’t know what that is yet”: conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, and Elizabeth Withstandley (Los Angeles, California, and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 January 2022); cf. conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, Elizabeth Withstandley, and public (Los Angeles, California; Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and elsewhere, via Zoom, 04 March 2022). “Part of whatever…laboratory for dialogue”: conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, and Elizabeth Withstandley (Los Angeles, California, and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 January 2022); and conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, Elizabeth Withstandley, and public (Los Angeles, California; Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and elsewhere, via Zoom, 04 March 2022). “I would like to participate in building that future”: conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, and Elizabeth Withstandley (Los Angeles, California, and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, via Zoom, 28 January 2022); cf. conversation with Alan Nakagawa, Gioj DeMarco, Elizabeth Withstandley, and public (Los Angeles, California; Bloomfield Hills, Michigan; and elsewhere, via Zoom, 04 March 2022).Alan Nakagawa is an interdisciplinary artist with archiving tendencies, primarily working with sound, often incorporating various media and working with communities and their histories.
Nakagawa has been working on a series of semi-autobiographic sound-architecture/tactile sound experiences, utilizing multi-point audio field recordings of historic interiors; Peace Resonance; Hiroshima/Wendover combines recordings of the interiors of the Hiroshima Atomic Dome (Hiroshima, Japan) and Wendover Hangar (Utah); Conical Sound; Antoni Gaudi and Simon Rodia combines recordings of the interiors of Watts Towers (Los Angeles) and the Sagrada Familia (Barcelona, Spain).
He’s in his fourth year as the artist-in-resident at the Pasadena Buddhist Temple through Side Street Projects, developing multi-disciplinary art projects in response to the history of the Temple and the Post-WWII Japanese American community it was founded by.
Nakagawa is also currently the artist-in-resident at the Gerth Archives, California State University Dominguez Hills assigned to the newly acquired L.A. Free Press/Art Kunkin Collection.
His first book, “A.I.R.Head: Anatomy of an Artist in Residence” was published in January 2023 by Writ-Large Press. It maps his artistic trajectory that led to his nine artist-in-residencies in six years.
