Japan Tour ’26 Chapter 7: “Pecha Kucha Night Kyoto”
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Saturday, October 3, was a particularly special day during our stay in Kyoto. In the afternoon, I had the wonderful opportunity to record music with soprano Sayo Teranishi at Amida-ji Temple in Yamashina, and that same evening, another exciting experience was waiting for us: participating in PechaKucha Night Kyoto at UrBANGUILD.
A few months before traveling to Japan, I had come across a call for speakers for PechaKucha Night Kyoto on Facebook. I noticed that the event coincided with our stay in the city and immediately started thinking about how we could participate.
PechaKucha is a presentation format in which each speaker shares 20 images, with each image displayed for exactly 20 seconds, making a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Instead of proposing a traditional talk, I thought it would be interesting to tell the story of The Kyoto Connection through a live musical performance, while 20 photographs on the screen illustrated our journey.
We called our presentation “The Kyoto Connection — A Dream 21 Years in the Making.”
The idea was to share how a musical project that began in Argentina more than twenty years ago, inspired by our love for Kyoto, had eventually brought us all the way to Japan to perform our music in the very city that inspired it.
That Saturday evening, Jesica, Cielo and I arrived at UrBANGUILD, a well-known venue in Kyoto’s independent music and arts scene. We set up our instruments, did our soundcheck and prepared everything for the performance.
Being there was already exciting for me. After so many years following Kyoto’s music and art scene from the other side of the world, I was finally getting the opportunity to perform on a stage that has hosted so many interesting artists and creative projects.
Our turn came around the middle of the evening, just after the break.
We began with a live improvisation, combining synthesizers, violin and atmospheric sounds while the photographs started telling our story on the screen. After a few minutes, we transitioned into “Setsuko’s Smile,” one of our compositions, which accompanied the remaining images until the end of our six-minute-and-forty-second presentation.
But perhaps the most beautiful part of the whole experience was something we hadn’t planned at all: Cielo danced throughout the entire performance.
While we played and the photographs moved across the screen, she danced freely beside us, becoming part of the presentation in her own way. Watching her enjoy the music and the stage so naturally made the experience even more meaningful for us.
In a way, it was a perfect representation of what The Kyoto Connection has become over the years. What started as a personal musical dream is now something we share as a family, and having Jesica and Cielo there with me made that moment particularly special.
After our presentation, we stayed to enjoy the rest of the event and talk with some of the people in the audience. Several attendees approached us to say how much they had enjoyed the music and how strongly they connected with our story and our relationship with Kyoto.
Those conversations meant a lot to us. For more than twenty years, we have been creating music inspired by this city, often from thousands of kilometers away, without really knowing how people in Kyoto might receive it. Being able to share that story in person and discover that it resonated with others was a wonderful experience.
This evening was another reminder of how many unexpected opportunities this journey has given us. A simple Facebook post that I discovered months earlier had eventually brought us to one of Kyoto’s most interesting cultural venues, where we could share our music, our story and our love for this city.
We want to express our deepest gratitude to the entire PechaKucha Night Kyoto team for welcoming us with so much warmth, kindness and generosity, and for giving us the opportunity to be part of such a wonderful evening.
Performing at UrBANGUILD, sharing our story through music and seeing Cielo dancing onstage while the images of our journey appeared behind us is something we will always treasure.
It was a night that will remain in our hearts forever.
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