Random Tone Bursts
- Issue #223 (September '02) | Interviews
- By: Chris Buck, Alan Licht | Featuring: Yasunao Tone
- Printable version
Digital composer Yasunao Tone's paramedia assault on old paradigms has led him from Tokyo to New York, via Japanese Fluxus pranks, work with Merce Cunningham and Yoko Ono, and destabilising CDs with Scotch tape
"My task is to wake people up from the 19th century," declares Yasunao Tone. "Walter Benjamin said that people are still dreaming in the 19th century, he wanted to wake people up from it. Concert halls are just that, a 19th century dream place."
As a composer, writer and artist, Tone has made avant garde performances since the late 50s in spaces ranging from Tokyo art galleries to New York's Shea Stadium. His obscurity might be explained by the fact that he somehow managed to avoid recording his music until the early 90s. To some, he is a key figure from the Japanese wing of the Fluxus art movement and Japan's 60s radical art scene; others may have seen him playing at multimedia festivals such as Lovebytes and Sonar, or heard his legendary Tzadik release, Solo For Wounded CD (1997), composed entirely of malfunctioning CD skipping, or caught one of his rare performances with Christian Marclay and Jim O'Rourke. Tone admits that his work is "hard to categorise - it's off-category". The diversity of noises that emanate from his digital-era electronic works rivals that of his own activities over the last four decades. This year, his achievements have been recognised by the Austrian Prix Ars Electronica, who awarded him this year's prize for digital music.
After studying literature at Chiba University, Tone began to frequent Tokyo's contemporary music concerts, where he kept running into former classmate Shuko Mizuno, who in turn introduced him to a fellow musicology student, Takehisa Kosugi. Kosugi and Mizuno had been improvising together on violin and cello respectively, and Tone soon joined them on saxophone. While he maintains he had no formal training, Tone did practise the sax, which he chose because it "was easier than the violin". Other students followed, and they became the first free improvised music group in Japan (if not the world; this is 1958). "We thought then, our improvisational performance could be a form of automatic writing, in a sense that the drip painting of Jackson Pollock was a form of automatic writing," he says. When a name was required for a dance performance, Tone came up with Ongaku, Japanese for 'Music'. An archival CD, Music Of Group Ongaku, released on Sound Art Library several years ago, provides an invaluable glimpse at the random noise generating that most listeners would associate with mid-60s Europe. "The question I posited then," he says, "was could Duchamp's Paris Air or urinal be translated into musical performance? That led us to use everyday objects as instruments." Tone's study of Dada and Surrealism provided the conceptual framework, it was only later that he listened to Ornette Coleman or Eric Dolphy. Tone also points to different ethnic musics, particularly Indian and the music used in Noh and Kabuki theatre, as an influence. In 1961 and 62, Tone and Kosugi also participated in Tokyo concerts by Yoko Ono (mostly pieces later published in her book Grapefruit) and Toshi Ichiyanagi (including a piece in which IBM computer punchcards were distributed to performers as a graphic score).
As a composer, writer and artist, Tone has made avant garde performances since the late 50s in spaces ranging from Tokyo art galleries to New York's Shea Stadium. His obscurity might be explained by the fact that he somehow managed to avoid recording his music until the early 90s. To some, he is a key figure from the Japanese wing of the Fluxus art movement and Japan's 60s radical art scene; others may have seen him playing at multimedia festivals such as Lovebytes and Sonar, or heard his legendary Tzadik release, Solo For Wounded CD (1997), composed entirely of malfunctioning CD skipping, or caught one of his rare performances with Christian Marclay and Jim O'Rourke. Tone admits that his work is "hard to categorise - it's off-category". The diversity of noises that emanate from his digital-era electronic works rivals that of his own activities over the last four decades. This year, his achievements have been recognised by the Austrian Prix Ars Electronica, who awarded him this year's prize for digital music.
After studying literature at Chiba University, Tone began to frequent Tokyo's contemporary music concerts, where he kept running into former classmate Shuko Mizuno, who in turn introduced him to a fellow musicology student, Takehisa Kosugi. Kosugi and Mizuno had been improvising together on violin and cello respectively, and Tone soon joined them on saxophone. While he maintains he had no formal training, Tone did practise the sax, which he chose because it "was easier than the violin". Other students followed, and they became the first free improvised music group in Japan (if not the world; this is 1958). "We thought then, our improvisational performance could be a form of automatic writing, in a sense that the drip painting of Jackson Pollock was a form of automatic writing," he says. When a name was required for a dance performance, Tone came up with Ongaku, Japanese for 'Music'. An archival CD, Music Of Group Ongaku, released on Sound Art Library several years ago, provides an invaluable glimpse at the random noise generating that most listeners would associate with mid-60s Europe. "The question I posited then," he says, "was could Duchamp's Paris Air or urinal be translated into musical performance? That led us to use everyday objects as instruments." Tone's study of Dada and Surrealism provided the conceptual framework, it was only later that he listened to Ornette Coleman or Eric Dolphy. Tone also points to different ethnic musics, particularly Indian and the music used in Noh and Kabuki theatre, as an influence. In 1961 and 62, Tone and Kosugi also participated in Tokyo concerts by Yoko Ono (mostly pieces later published in her book Grapefruit) and Toshi Ichiyanagi (including a piece in which IBM computer punchcards were distributed to performers as a graphic score).