Raised between Japan and Vancouver, Kai Kubota-Enright started composing only relatively recently, when she moved to Montréal to study at McGill in 2018. Success came quite quickly: in 2022 she won the ROSL Composition Award, resulting in a London Sinfonietta premiere at the Purcell Room, and in 2025 spatial communication of dripstone won McGill’s Graham Sommer Competition where it was premiered by Ensemble Paramirabo.

 

Kubota-Enright’s work is often associated with a very particular sonic experience, and thus with a specific time and place. This is often focussed on the sounds of nature, whether the calls of cicadas or the noises of underground rivers. In this case, in 2023 she visited Shikoku, the smallest of Japan’s four islands. While there, she travelled to the Mikuro and Shinmei caves on the eastern coast, most famous for being the place where the monk Kūkai, the founder of Shingon Buddhism, reached enlightenment. On entering the caves, Kubota-Enright recalls that there was “this endless dripping of water from all different directions, and listening to it carefully you hear not just the dripping but the way the sound of the dripping reflects and augments through the different reverberations within the cave.”

 

The piece takes this quite literally: the piano and vibraphone, with what Kubota-Enright describes as their more “watery feel”, act as the droplets. Meanwhile, the other instruments then augment and reflect these sounds around the space. The music is elusive: often delighting in the smudging of timbres achieved by extended ways of playing and very soft dynamics.

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Joshua Ballance