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Nobukazu Takemura
is a Japanese musician whose style has run from
jazz to
house to
chamber music to
Merzbow-esque electronic glitches within less than a decade. Born in
Osaka in August of
1968, he became interested in punk and new wave music at a young age,
and by high school, after a record store job that exposed him to
Jazz and
Hip-hop, he had regular gigs as a battle DJ.
In 1990, Takemura founded
Audio Sports with Yamatsuka Eye (of
the Japanese noise band
The Boredoms) and Aki Onada. Their
first album, Era of Glittering Gas, was released in 1992 (after
which Onada subsequently took control of the project), the same year as
Takemura's first solo album, under the name DJ Takemura. He has also
released material with
Spiritual Vibes (since 1993) and as
Child's View (since 1994). He is
currently paired with Childisc vocalist/composer
Aki Tsuyuko under the touring name
of Assembler.
He founded the Lollop and Childisc labels ; his
voluminous releases, remixes, and collaborations make a comprehensive
discography difficult, and his music often defies any easy categorization.
He emerged in the US after the release of Scope on the Thrill
Jockey label in 1999, an album that features delicate melodies blossoming
from oceans of
white noise and staccato electronics.
Takemura was also responsible for the sound design of
Sony's robotic dog
Aibo. In the January 2002 issue of the UK music magazine The Wire,
he notes that conveying hundreds of emotions through the dog's few simple
sounds was not easy :
"Usually people don't think consciously of what it's like
to be angry or to cry ... humans can obviously use words to express
themselves. To create the sounds of emotions was a difficult task."
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