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Geinoh Yamashirogumi is a Japanese musical collective founded in 1974 by
Shoji Yamashiro, consisting of hundreds of people from all walks of life:
journalists, doctors, engineers, students, businessmen, etc. This array of
talents and ideas brings a peerless degree of creativity to their work,
which is known for a skillful fusion of traditional music with high
technology. For example, in the 1980s, MIDI digital synthesizers could not
handle the tuning systems of traditional gamelan music, so the group had to
start from scratch, teaching themselves how to program in order to modify
their equipment. This was while they were working on what would become their
most well-known work, the soundtrack of Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira.
Geinoh Yamashirogumi has faithfully and accurately reproduced over eighty
different styles of traditional music and performances from around the
world, but despite having performed internationally to a high degree of
critical acclaim, they remain relatively unknown.
It has been said that Yamashiro took his inspiration from a postwar 1950s
group of similar character that lived as a commune, but this could be
apocryphal.
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