Is Masakatsu Takagi a musician that makes video art or a video artist that makes music?
At Takagi's performance last week at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., part of the center's two-week Japan! culture + hyperculture festival, the music was definitely the draw. Playing piano and accompanied by a second pianist and two vocalists, Takagi played a series of compositions — spare, quiet (or "empty," as one reviewer put it) — with videos flickering in the background.
Though usually classified as an electronica artist, the 29-year-old Takagi could just as easily be described as a minimalist. His taste for repetition is as much a nod to Steve Reich as Brian Eno. Listen closely and there is an emotional bravado — think of Brahms lurking just underneath the surface or a less restrained Eric Satie — that is testament to his training as a classical pianist and which gives his music an organic, human quality.