This is a version of an electronic piece DITF performed during a Japan tour with Floris Vanhoof, in may-june 2023. These electronic sounds served as a background to concrete parts. Every night a new soundscape unfolded.

We are inside the office of Hirokazu-San, the director of Ujikoen. Ujikoen is a historical tea company based in Kizugawa near Kyoto.

There’s four of us Kojima Hirokazu : director of the tea company Kazuki Tomita : a translator hired for our project Floris Vanhoof : multimedia artist Lieven Martens : sound recordist

In this office Hirokazu-San tastes and slurps tea every day. Carefully he boils the water, selects the leaves, tastes the harvest, sip. Rounding up to about 300.000 sips - or more? - during his years studying for, and being a, teamaster.

He blends with his tongue. Carefully combining different leaves from different soils. I had no idea they blended tea in this Geuze/Champagne manner.

I walk outside the factory building. I walk around it. A faint smell of cat pee. The gravel makes sound under my sandals. I look up and see an airplane carefully drawing a straight line in the sky.

A memory comes with every taste. It will be a blend.

This story takes place in the Uji region where the highest standard tea leaves are grown. Because of the mist, the air, the blue mountains, the people, … And in this particular office, in this factory building, in this village. I think about and follow every sound. To what was and where it goes.

And up there in the misty mountains, I saw the tea plant creep into the forrest as a snake, as a bear, as smoke.