Sōgi explores death and Japanese funerary rites from an anthropological point of view. This work reflects a contrast between modern and traditional ideas. It is comprised of four different acts:
1. Seppukku
Routes the listener’s heart into the last minutes of the mind of a lost person, with no hope, sank in a sea of modern worries and low self-esteem. The piece is a tunnel of anxiety and desperation that ends in a traditional form of suicide.
This act should be listened to from a first person perspective.
2. Sōgi
Routes the listener’s mind into the funeral rite of the person who committed suicide. Minimal, contemplative and meditative tendencies. The prayers are full of shame and stupefaction after discovering the corpse. The other people cannot explain reasons of why he put an end to his life.
This act should be listened to from a third person perspective.
3. Kasō
Routes the listener’s body into the deceased’s soul during the cremation process. The sensation of being trapped inside the coffin, entering the furnace, full of culpability and rage about all those who feel shame, disappearing from the physical world.
This act should be listened to from a first person perspective.
4. Onryō
Routes the listener’s soul into another metaphysical plane. The purgatory itself as an entity, expels the vengeful soul of the deceased person, who blinded by grief, is coming back to a place between the physical and the astral plane.
This act is influenced by the sounds and sensations that can be listened to, experienced and felt during an astral projection, when the person is traveling through different planes of reality.