Japan’s relationship with sound is certainly unusual. While walking the 88-temple pilgrimage of Shikoku, Neil Cantwell, a British musician, writer and sometime filmmaker, recalls staying with a woman who “just talked for hours about how much she loved the sound of the rain on the leaves.” In Japan, he says, sound “provides this really deep inspiration for a lot of people I’ve met, which I just haven’t encountered anywhere else.”

Cantwell has spent the past decade approaching this relationship from different angles: via academia, film, music and now virtual reality. His 2011 documentary, “KanZeOn”, co-directed with Tim Grabham, explores what he describes as “the physicality of sound and how it sits in a landscape.” Told across a series of meditative, elliptical sequences, it follows a trio of musicians steeped in Japanese tradition: sh? player Eri Fujii; Akihiro Iitomi, an expert in kotsuzumi drumming and noh theater; and Akinobu Tatsumi (aka Ta2mi), a Buddhist monk who moonlights as a beatboxer and hip-hop scratch DJ. The Japan Times

Japan Sound Portrait