joy_circumcision

I've just waded through most of the big names (AMM, Taku Sugimoto's wide-ranging collaborations with every musician in Japan, the lowercase movement that I'm not sure if it's associated [Beuger, Ullmann, etc.]) and found a couple second-tier popularity acts that I'm into (Dieb13 and stuff) so we can explore together!

Basically, for those who don't know about the genre, EAI/Onkyo is generally the West's/Japanese (respectively) approach to expanding on John Cage's ideas about silences and "what is music." (This is really reductionist, but lemme get there!) EAI got started with AMM (and a couple of Cage's own compositions, I'm told), and Keith Rowe continues to be very prominent in the genre. He uses prepared guitars (guitars laid down and tweaked a bit to produce very different sounds) primarily. It sorta has roots in free jazz and is all about improvisations and interactions between performers. It needs to be heard to be understood, really. Here's an example of EAI:



They typically will use things like blenders and appliances and things sort of like Fluxus did with their indeterminancy pieces. It's sort of a synthesis of all the hip cool avant garde 20th Century movements, really. As for Onkyo, it is a lot more pre-disposed to using silence (though the line between the genres ends up being primarily geographic just because they switch off what are supposedly their respective aesthetics quite often) and sustained notes. One of the main people there is Taku Sugimoto, who plucks strings with varying intensities and at random durations. Again, this is a genre built on improvisations, so the idea here is to be put in a trance, highly anticipatory for each note, while each note sort of lingers on and blends into the next one. Definitely for a specific mood! Here's an example of the kind of guitar style I'm talking about:



For people who are interested, this is the primary resource I use.

Thanks a lot!

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