Photographer Kei Murata’s series All I Can See reconsiders the mysteries of human vision through the backdrop of Ginza.

This time, he turns to the sense of immersion that emerges between music and moving images. Beyond the landscapes we can see, other sensations begin to take shape—through the vibrations of the body and the shifting contours of memory—quietly forming landscapes of their own.

#7 MIBKVD

When I saw my bloody valentine perform live, I was surprised by how cinematic the experience felt. At the same time, it made me wonder whether most films are, in fact, fundamentally representational.
Take a scene in which a man is sitting in a café drinking tea. From his clothes and the logos on them, we can infer the brands he wears. We can identify the brand of cigarettes on the table, even the article he is reading in the newspaper spread open before him. In such a scene, the situation is described through what is visibly present.
At a my bloody valentine concert, however, a scene emerged in a very different way. Visually, there was little more than the band members performing and abstract projections that were almost pure colour. There was still a connection to the fact that people on the same scale as myself were producing these sounds. Yet the landscape evoked by the music lacked visible specificity, making it impossible to examine in concrete detail or at high resolution.
And yet, the mood of that landscape—the texture of the space it created—felt more immersive than anything I have experienced in a visual film. Was it because the overwhelming volume of the guitar noise vibrated everything from the fine hairs on my arms to my eardrums, allowing a single sonic event to connect the inside and outside of the body? The male and female vocals intertwining in the background sounded less like singing than conversation. Not in the sense of storytelling, but as though they were directly constructing the texture of that moment as a landscape.

Perhaps part of the difference lies in the fact that film must create an external body in the form of a screen, whereas music physically vibrates the eardrums and the body itself. Then again, since the eye receives light, perhaps cinema is bodily too—the screen functioning like an amplifier. If so, what accounts for the difference in sensation?
This may also explain why VJ visuals do not always work in live performance. Concrete images projected onto an external screen can sometimes undermine the physicality of music. At times, however, the power of the image overcomes this limitation. Ryoji Ikeda, for example, seems to achieve a unique form of corporeality through moving images. His intricate grid patterns pass through the screen and are projected onto the eyelids—not as binary flashes like a strobe light, but as continuously modulated fields of intensity and phase.

*Of course, this is a drastic simplification, but if rock is understood as being primarily concerned with emotion, while electronica and ambient music are more concerned with landscape, it becomes easier to understand why someone raised on rock might arrive at ambient music by way of my bloody valentine. Perhaps it was because their music occupies a space between emotion and landscape that it felt cinematic to me.
RIDE, on the other hand, possesses the charm of a coming-of-age film in which the band members seem to be both directors and protagonists. Their youthful appearance is part of that attraction. Seeing them now, older than before, feels a little like watching T2 Trainspotting—and that carries its own kind of emotion.

Considering the difference between film and music in this way also made me realise that different senses—sight, hearing, smell—seem to store memories differently.
With film, memories are often retained in concrete units: “that scene,” “that shot.” Vision feels like a sense that readily records the external world. Music—particularly long-form experiences such as dance music or ambient sets—seems to be remembered in a more continuous and indistinct way, apart from highly coded moments such as drops. Yet what often remains most vividly is how my own body changed during the experience, or how I was listening at the time. Perhaps hearing is a sense that more readily records internal transformation. The sound of fingernails scraping a blackboard, for instance, is almost impossible to recall without also recalling a bodily sensation of discomfort.

Smell works differently again. A scent can suddenly summon a specific memory without warning. Perhaps this is because smell is connected to memory in a way that seems to leap across time. Because most people understand the world primarily through vision, visual information has been described and categorised in great detail. By contrast, we possess far less common language for discussing sound or smell. While writing this, I began to wonder whether we simply pay less attention to remembering anything beyond visual information in everyday life. Then I reconsidered. When we silently repeat something in our minds, we are not only remembering it visually but also auditorily. Perhaps the effectiveness of writing things down or reading them aloud when memorising information comes from linking external, visual information to internal sensory experiences such as hearing and touch.
In painting, representational works are often compared to windows, opening onto a reality that exists on a different plane from the body viewing them. Abstract painting, by contrast, derives its reality from its material presence, asserting itself as something continuous with the body of the viewer. This is, of course, an extreme simplification, but if we accept the distinction for a moment, the difference between cinema and my bloody valentine might also be understood as a difference in where reality is situated. Cinema constructs a world on the far side of the screen. My Bloody Valentine, meanwhile, creates its images on the same plane as the body. Perhaps the kind of cinema I have in mind here is specifically American cinema.

The fact that formats such as 4DX and IMAX employ sound, touch, and even smell in an attempt to connect the viewer’s body with the world beyond the screen can be understood as one effort to bridge this gap. Conversely, theatrical staging can give music a more concrete reality. Yet there are times when the performer’s body appears to occupy a different dimension from that of the audience, and the shared physicality of music begins to diminish.
Immersion, it seems to me, occurs when the viewer or listener feels that their own body and the thing they are experiencing exist on the same plane.
And if that is true, I find myself pausing to wonder how deeply immersed I am in the things I pass each day, and how rich those experiences might actually be.

Kei Murata
Artist / Photographer
Kei Murata is an artist and photographer based in Tokyo. With a Master’s degree in Oil Painting from Tokyo University of the Arts (2016), Murata creates works that examine the transformations of perception and scale, using photography and video as his primary mediums.
His recent exhibitions include NEW ANXIETIES (N/A Seoul, 2025), Correspondence (a83, New York, 2023), EENT (POST-FAKE projects, Tokyo, 2023), between / of (The 5th Floor, Tokyo, 2022), and VOCA 2022 (The Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo, 2022).

Website: keimurata.com
Instagram: @kemrta