Meet the artist: Yuto Obata
Meet composer Yuto Obata and learn more about his upcoming New Voices series concert.
Describe yourself as an artist in five words
Capturing beauty in ignorable sounds.
Where do you find spaces or moments for creativity and making something new?
A clean, silent, and solitary room with a cup of coffee, allowing me to sharply focus. And social, collaborative time with inspiring people. New ideas always emerge from this process of alternating between these two contrasting environments: solidarity and sociality.
Your multidisciplinary concert in the New Voices series will feature your recent works for duos. What kind of experience can the audience expect?
Duo or duet is one of my ideal formations for my artistic ambition: to seek the continuum among seemingly disparate elements. To uncover this shared territory, I explore the most delicate, fragile, and ephemeral sounds produced by each instrument, as if through a microscope. By focusing on these marginal sounds, the works presented in this concert reveal unexpected connections between different instruments and performance practices.
I have explored this approach since I started my artistic activity in Finland four years ago. The audience can hear a trajectory of my artistic experiments in this concert.
What should listeners pay special attentions to your upcoming concert?
This solo exhibition concert presents my recent duo works, including flute duo, violin and accordion, soprano voice and alto saxophone, and a work for pianist and dancer with multimedia, which is a career challenge for me.
The new work, Palm-of-the-Hand Songs (2026), is a collaborative work with the dancer Ada Freund and pianist Lambis Pavlou. In this piece, I explore not only sonic similarities but also visual and physical correspondences between a pianist and a dancer. Bodily gestures, incidental noises, and subtle movements are treated as shared material, blurring distinctions between music-making and choreography. Through this interdisciplinary expansion, the work extends my ongoing investigation of ambiguity, intimacy, and perceptual uncertainty into a performative and visual context.
Your summer greetings to the readers?
Madder-red sunset at 11 pm, smelling lavender from somewhere, listening to bird songs in trees… Finnish summer is always inspiring for me, but it ends shortly! Do not miss the fleeting season and enjoy it while opening your senses :)