Lift

It’s a wonderful thing to spend hours rehearsing the music of Koki Nakano without being able to talk to him in any serious way: no Japanese, no French, no English, no diplomacy, just a territory - the art of Koki Nakano.  

The piano and the cello are oldschool, almost basic instruments, but they also have a memory, a DNA, a history. And these venerable tools, voluminous and impractical in this age of dematerialisation, are marvellous magicians. Thanks to them, without exchanging a single word, questions still get asked, there’s still sweat, ardour, laughter, acrobatics, irritation, the fear of doing things badly, the art of doing them well, fulfilment.  

In the tiny studio in the Parisian neighbourhood of Les Buttes Chaumont, where Koki was living, I could touch the piano with the bow in my right hand and boil up some water with my left hand. And yet when I left, I had the impression I’d been on Mars, or by a lake, or in a Berlin loft, or with the fairies.  

Music means nothing, but it’s still a matter of life and death for Koki Nakano .  

Vincent Segal