Music is the result of chaos and control—a chest full of breath captured passing through the vocal cords, energy overflowing the confines of a taut string, the oscillation of a synthesizer circuit passing current and information around the labyrinth of the modern electronic instrument.
In the world of experimental and avant-garde music, control becomes a very important concept.
Pushing boundaries, playing with the limits of music, listenership, and performance, looking for new taps into that precious source, all of these considerations, and more, boil down to similar conceits—what is within and out of our control?
Within electronic music, some of the most unfamiliar sonic territory can be crossed thanks to the circuit, whose relatively short stay in human history has changed so much. Thanks to the extreme customizability and specificity of electronic devices and instruments, and considering the possibilities of the unknown when such inhuman intelligence collaborates with human ingenuity, electronic music has been on the forefront of avant-garde composition around the world. Creating a global web of genres focusing on beautiful thinking and the promise of technology.
One such movement obsessed with constraint and control is the Japanese Onkyo music, or Onkyokei, which translated means “reverberation of sound.”
The Birth of a Sound
Onkyo is the product of a musical happening in Japan which started in the late 1990s. Part of the nebulous web of ambient and minimalism-oriented nodes across the globe, Onkyo centers first around free improvisation and is concerned with creating a completely new listening experience through very quiet music interested in the textures of silence and unconventional dynamics.
To put it simply, Onkyo music is very, very quiet.
Similar to lowercase music, a type of minimal ambient composition which features very quiet and even unheard sounds, Onkyo makes use of electronics to find those recessive sounds hidden in the wake of more dominant, conventional musical moments.
Continuing in the tradition of the noise-obsessed before, Onkyo music is part of the larger electroacoustic improvisation (EAI) music movement. In a sense, EAI music is one of the very first manifestations of live electronic music, it is characterized by the improvisational manipulation of acoustic sound with electronics and an offshoot of electroacoustic music (EA). Practitioners of EAI music are able to manipulate the open-ended definition of the genre to great avant-garde ends, creating unique and subversive music. Discovering new relationships between the performer and sound and the audience and that sound and that performer is a never ending journey, and Onkyokei is a great chapter in the story of experimental music and electronics.
Electronics, in the context of Onkyo music, include devices outside of the normal instruments and signal processors that you find in a conventional studio environment; in fact, Onkyokei makes use of electronics in ways rarely seen in other electronic and ambient spaces.
Toshimaru Nakamura, one of the main practitioners and participants in Onkyo movement, notably performs with a no-input mixing board—choosing to forego a conventional instrument entirely and instead sculpt feedback, using the mixer as the sound source, the sound modulator, and the amplifier, all contained within the confines of a device, which under intended circumstances, is completely silent. By subjecting the mixer's inputs to its own outputs, latent aspects of the mixer's circuitry come to the forefront—and it transforms into an unpredictable, lively, and surprising tool for sonic exploration. Other Onkyo artists would come to coax unexpected or unintended textures from their own electronic devices—prepared turntables, hacked samplers, and more.
Silence and experimental music are very closely intertwined—a very loose, and natural, definition of a sound would be loud or quiet, there is a lot of room for variation between the two and thinking about sound in terms of dynamics, instead of regional, temporal, and subjective classifications like does it sound “good,” allows the performer to bring just about anything they want into their space and create without limits.
Beauty in the Shadows
Such exploration was a constant at Off Site, one of Japan’s most historied house venues, counter-culture hub, and the petri dish from which Onkyo music was dreamt, cultured, and spread. Set in the shadow of the 60-story NTT DoCoMo skyscraper, headquarters to one of Japan’s most innovative mobile phone companies, Off Site existed to juxtapose the greed and avarice of the modern march.
Off Site offered a haven for the ideals of Japanese avant-garde music, notably Japanese noise, which has been one of the most interesting sonic outputs of the country, dating back to the 1970s.
From Merzbow to Boredoms, the turn of the millennium Japanese experimental scene featured many energetic, chaotic, frenetic artists with an affinity for noise, extreme live performances, and just as radical lifestyles. For Off Site, a devotion to alternative listening experiences would lead the way to Onkyokei, challenging the idea of contemporary experimental music and tapping into a shared vision preserved by Japanese music makers for centuries.
The story of Off Site and Onkyo music are quite intertwined—in fact, the two are quite symbiotic.
Off Site was once a two story home, but under the guiding hand of renters, couple Atsuhiro Ito and wife Yukari, the two story building featured a first floor venue, which capped at 50 attendees, and a record store and cafe upstairs.
Under scrutiny from their surroundings and noise complaints from neighbors, Off Site necessitated performances that would keep the city government off the backs of those creating there, the creators of Onkyokei, who would take this constraint and let it blossom into possibility.
The solution: to play quiet music.
It seems situational, but in truth the trend towards quietness was set without the persistence of noise inspectors or any restriction put on the collective of recurring contributors at Off Site. Experimental guitarist Taku Sugimoto would be the first to make a quiet noise at Off Site, but Sugimoto and his cohort would be the generative force behind the Onkyo moment.
Discovering New Quiet Architectures
At the center of the activity at Off Site was improv trio Toshimaru Nakamura, Tetuzi Akiyama, and Taku Sugimoto. The group of inspired experimental musicians hosted a set of recurring shows, or “meetings”, as they were named, based on a run of successful avant-garde performances, “Improvisational Meetings”, at legendary nightlife hot-spot Bar Aoyama.
Alongside Nakamura’s no-input mixing board, both Akiyama and Sugimoto brought their own style of renowned guitar playing—albeit each their own unique voice. Taku Sugimoto an internationally acclaimed solo guitarist and Tetuzi Akiyama the experimental, hard rock solo guitarist who once used a katana (a 100 year old iai-do sword, meant to be wielded with poetry accompaniment) to bow his resonator guitar.
Nakamura was an almost unstoppable creative force. His out of the box thinking and technical practice of feedback sculpting is encapsulated so perfectly in his album Vehicle (2002) released on Cubic Music, run by renowned sound artist and composer Keiichi Sugimoto. Nakamura’s numbered No Input Mixing-Board records now stand as an iconic introduction to Onkyo.
Taku Sugimoto’s Flagments of Paradise (1997) and tori (2001) set such a unique precedent for free improv guitar performance, with moody and autonomous dynamic realms that pull and push the listener dictated by Taku’s delicacy. His discography is absolutely prolific and he is still producing reduced, minimalist, compositions today. Sugimoto’s name is not uncommon on the back of an Onkyo record, his openness to collaboration made him a foundation in his scene and in the recorded legacy of Onkyokei.
Long-time Sugimoto collaborator, Tetuzi Akiyama would round the group out with his singular guitar style, affinity for noise, and careful hand at electronics. Akiyama’s second album, Résophonie (2002) is Onkyokei through and through. Here, Tetuzi implements the iai-do katana to bow the guitar and transfer energy around the resonant instrument. The album sounds at once a highly experimental solo-guitar performance on a prepared instrument and genre breaking, harmonically stenciled, metallic drone, moving from slashes of high frequency to the slow draw of some massive out-of-reference buzzsaw.
Together, the three unique experimental musicians created a fertile space for their new quiet sound through their regular meetings, launching a genre which appreciated improvisation and beautiful thinking.
A Richer Silence
Onkyo music introduces a few beautiful thoughts into the EAI, free improv, turntable, electronic landscape.
The first is the Japanese concept of “ma”—which is the space between notes, or sounds, and points to a deeper appreciation for sound and no sound.
Onkyo music attempts at almost no sound, a delicate veil which can only be passed. Onkyo music seems to find those moments at the edge of noise and silence—those new sonic experiences which can be coaxed from the performer's imagination through novel uses of electronics and conventional instruments.
The use of the word “onkyo” would be Onkyo music’s second beautiful thought. The term “onkyo” is a perfect moniker for what the original practitioners were attempting to create, a sort of “pre-music” which resisted definition, but was more than just noise—it was first used to describe uncategorizable minimalist, electronic recordings at the West Tokyo record store, Paris-Peking, “Onkyô-ha”.
Onkyo is the marriage of two words—a coupling of two kanji which refer to sound and vibration.
Not to be misunderstood as redundant, the use of Onkyo in the case of Onkyokei is the transmission of sound through the air, a sonic experience that is heard and felt, but is technical in nature, not just an aesthetic definition. Onkyokei is as concerned with the process as the product.
While Onkyo music features modern technology, the moniker’s unique composition is part of the very fabric of Japan, similar to “ongaku”, which predates Portuguese contact and was kept at the periphery of Japanese music to describe sound that is not easily categorized—opposed to “ongyoku” which is uses the characters for “sound” and tune” and describes music in the general sense.
Onkyo-ha, was certainly an apt title for the work from genre defiant electronic and sound musicians Ami Yoshida, Toshiya Tsunoda, and Utah Kawasaki, the same artists who would find similar purchase in Onkyokei. Ultimately, it would be at Off Site that the loosely distributed “onkyo-ha” sound would be eschewed for Onkyo.
A Movement of Collaboration
While the genre saw its most activity in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, good things certainly die hard.
Thanks to a culture of technology and creativity, and connected to sound events at organizations like the NTT InterCommunication Center in Tokyo City, like Mego@ICC: The Future of Techno Music (1999) and Sound Art: Sound as Media (2001), Onkyo music was of the future.
Original Onkyo work includes a prolific list of collaborations between Toshimaru Nakamura, Otomo Yoshihide, Tetuzi Akiyama, Sachiko M, Taku Sugimoto, Toshiya Tsunoda, and more.
Groups like the glitchy, Nerve Net Noise, I.S.O., Tsunoda’s WRK, Akiyama and Sugimoto’s project with experimental analog synthesist Utah Kawasaki, mon.goose;, and others also added to the soundscape, an explosion of solo, collaborative one-offs, and full band Onkyo music.
Albums like Gravity Clock (1998) by I.S.O. (electronic trio, Yoshimitsu Ichiraku, Sachiko M, and Otomo Yoshihide), Brain-Wash (1998) by Yasuhiro Otani, Sine Wave Solo (1999) by Sachiko M, 29092000 (2001) by Sachiko M and Otomo Yoshihide’s duo, Filament, Ajar (2001) by Otomo Yoshihide and Taku Sugimoto and UK player Keith Rowe, and the canonical album Improvised Music From Japan (2001), which features work from Onkyo mainstays, recordings from Ground Zero (the pre-Off Site, Japanese noise incubator), and more, showing off everything from glitchy, minimal electronics to more identifiable free improvisational work (across 10 discs), would set the stage for the next 20 years of quiet electronic improv from Japan.
Onkyo spread across the globe thanks to events like the Music Unlimited festival in Australia and, through the many connections to the west, joined in with the similarly quiet electronic scenes in Berlin, UK, and Chicago.
A More Quiet Now
Today, the boomerang of taste has kept many experimental and avant-garde movements alive through re-releases and the passage of time and artists’ sensibilities. Modern Onkyokei features additions from original performers and new players alike.
Check out Minami Saeki and Taku Sugimoto’s two to you too (2024) and listening to improvisation 3 (2024), which follows with Sugimoto’s series of numbered improvisation albums. Likewise, the release of Otomo Yoshihide’s Hummingbird and Four Flowers: Turntable and Harmonium Solo Live (2024) provides a new perspective on how Onkyo might evolve, recorded in 2022.
Likewise, the entire discography of Minami Saeki would seem to be leading towards the Onkyo horizon, featuring work ranging from experimental chamber to the reductionism of her many collaborations with Taku Sugimoto.
The Future Between Futures
While the immediacy of those original meetings at Off Site held the true spark of the Onkyo music moment, the movement which came from that small two story apartment will remain a legacy as modern music instrument makers (Meng-qi, SOMA Laboratories, Neutral Labs, Ciat Lonbarde, and more) continue to create instruments which drive at the heart of sound, that boundary between silence and noise, make it easier for instrumental, EAI, and ambient musicians to understand and learn from the mysteries of Onkyokei.
Curtis Emery is a writer, poet, and synthesist from New England. You can find Curtis’s work on the web and in print. Head over to curtisemery.io to read more.
