Fondazione Prada with Threes Productions presents a live performance in which the American composer Tashi Wada with Julia Holter will feature the tracks of his new album What Is Not Strange?. The concert, realized by Threes Productions, in collaboration with Fondazione Prada, will take place on Wednesday, 6 November 2024, at 8 pm in the Church of Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa in Milan.
The church’s interior, designed by Giovanni Muzio in 1932, becomes the stage for a unique creative dialogue between Tashi Wada’s music and the site-specific intervention Untitled (1997) by Dan Flavin (United States, 1933 – 1996). Fondazione Prada produced Flavin’s work in collaboration with the Dia Center for the Arts in New York and Dan Flavin Estate on the occasion of his first Italian solo exhibition organized in Milan by Fondazione Prada, which has been supervising and supporting the conservation of the work ever since.
What Is Not Strange? is Tashi Wada’s most extensive and passionate musical work performed live with his partner Julia Holter. His artistic practice investigates the effects of resonance and dissonance in music by using unconventional tuning systems and simple sound structures, provoking unexpected and almost dream-like emotional states in listeners that change from moment to moment.
Born in Los Angeles, Wada embraced his family’s artistic heritage. Son of Fluxus composer Yoshi Wada and artist and gallery owner Marilyn Bogerad, he lived in close contact with figures such as Simone Forti and Nam June Paik. As the musician says, “One thing I’ve gotten from working with these artists who were coming of age in the ’60s and ’70s is an interesting perspective on the culture and how people were connected—just seeing who, through letters, was in touch with whom, and how that reflects on the community. Something that’s inspiring to me from that era is how people were really in dialogue with each other. They weren’t necessarily working in the same medium. It was very fluid, and it had this propulsion.”
After studying at the California Institute of the Arts with composer James Tenney, in 2017, Wada created the ensemble Tashi Wada Group and recorded his first album, Nue (2018), made in collaboration with his father and released by RVNG Intl. His most recent works include: Table of Visions (2021), composed with Alexander Provan for the Steinway Spirio piano system and commissioned by the Hammer Museum and Triple Canopy magazine; Borrowed Light (2021) written for flutist Manuel Zurria; and Above as Below (2021) composed for cellist Charles Curtis. What Is Not Strange? (2024) is his first full-length album.
This initiative marks the fourth collaboration between Fondazione Prada and Threes, which, since 2017, has organized a series of musical projects in the Church of Santa Maria Annunciata in Chiesa Rossa. The concerts have featured different forms of sound expression, including, tape loops by William Basinsiki (2017), the Church organ performance by Charlemagne Palestine (2018) and Ellen Arkbro (2021), Arvö Part’s performance of the iconic Tabula Rasa (2019), Dies Irae, performed by Maria Horn (2022) and a choir of four female voices, and the sound experimentation by FUJI|||||||||||TA (2023) and Marta De Pascalis (2024).