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Otomo Yoshihide
(born
August 1,
1959) is a
Japanese
experimental musician. He is a
turntablist and
guitarist.
Otomo was born in
Yokohama. He played in rock bands while at college, but turned to
improvisation after discovering
free jazz and
free improvisation musicians like the guitarist
Derek Bailey, the saxophonist
Kaoru Abe and guitarist
Masayuki Takayanagi (from whom he
had lessons).
Otomo studied at
Tokyo University from 1979 where he took a course on
ethnomusicology in which he concentrated on Japanese pop music during
World War II and the development of musical instruments during the Chinese
Cultural Revolution (samples of instruments and music from this period
are found in several of his records). From 1981 Otomo played free
improvisation in clubs, performing on guitar and also using tapes and
electronics.
Otomo began to release records from the end of the 1980s.
He has been very prolific, working in a variety of styles and collaborating
with a range of musicians. For much of the 1990s his main project was
Ground Zero, a large group founded
in 1990 with an ever-changing lineup. They played music in a variety of
styles, perhaps best summed up as
noise rock with an experimental
edge: in Consume Red (1997), for example, a sample of Korean
musician Kim Suk Chul playing the
hojok (a reed instrument) is continuously repeated throughout the single
hour-long track while the band imporovise around it, becoming louder, and
eventually swamping the sample out.
Ground Zero was disbanded in 1998. Towards the end of
that group's life, Otomo formed
Filament with
Sachiko M, an outfit which
concentrated on music made from sine waves, clicks and hums, and I. S. O. (Otomo,
Sachiko M and
Yoshimitsu Ichiraku), which played
purely electronic improvisations. He also continued to play with other
musicians on a variety of projects.
At the end of the 1990s he founded Otomo Yoshihide's New
Jazz Ensemble, a group that played more traditional jazz (albeit with added
sine waves from Sachiko M and noisy passages), which released Flutter
and Dreams on the
Tzadik label. In
Japan, a more consistent lineup of the group, using the name Otomo
Yoshihide's New Jazz Quintet, has has released "ONJQ LIVE" (2002), a
collaboration with
Tatsuya Oe entitled "ONJQ+OE"
(2003), and "Tails Out" (2003).
Records released under his own name include Cathode
(1999), which includes sine wave-based pieces and pieces mainly made from
samples, and Anode (2001), a group improvisation where the players
are constrained by certain pre-determined rules (similar to
John Zorn's "game pieces" such as Pool and Archery).
Otomo has also released duo albums with early
experimental turntablist
Christian Marclay ("Moving Parts", 2000) and another Japanese electronic
musician,
Nobukazu Takemura ("Turntables + Computers", 2003).
Among the other musicians Otomo has worked with are
Jon Rose,
Yamatsuka Eye of
The Boredoms (with Eye as MC
Hellshit and Otomo as DJ Carhouse),
Butch Morris,
Voice Crack and
poire_zed.
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