Looking for a regular practice we could undertake when we got together four years ago, we became students of the Urasenke tradition of Japanese tea ceremony, and found that it perfectly inflected our mutual interest in early house music.
We draw a parallel between 'the house that Jack built' and the tea room, positing that in both arenas aesthetics function as a form of care by way of surrender. One gives into 'the beat' as one gives into the arcane intricacies of the tea procedure.
In our last version at The Mistake Room in Los Angeles, we built a 14 square foot house designed in collaboration with Shannon Scrofano in reference to traditional tea houses. We invited groups of 14 guests in at a time to watch and listen to live versions of early house music classics, shaped by the social aesthetics and choreographic structures of tea.
Since then, we have had a child: our daughter Orlando is now one years old. This summer, as resident artists at Headlands Center for the Arts we began making a new set of House Music created and performed specifically for our household gods.
In it, we get into some deep house and trance music by way of Okucha, one of the tea procedures (of which there are over 400) designed to remember the passing of the grand tea master.
- Jennie Liu and Andrew Gilbert