Yoshihide Otomo

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Yoshihide Otomo (大友良英, Ōtomo Yoshihide^?, born August 1, 1959 in Yokohama, Japan; his family name is Otomo) is an experimental musician, a turntablist, guitarist, filmscore composer, and avant-garde composer. 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 the Meiji 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 (Jazz Kissa), performing on guitar and also using tapes and electronics.

1 Ground Zero
2 Filament
3 New Jazz Ensemble
4 Other works
5 Works Cited
6 External links

[edit] Ground Zero

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 and a heavy emphasis on sampling: 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.

[edit] Filament

Ground Zero was disbanded in 1998. Towards the end of that group's life, Otomo formed two electronic free improvisation groups: Filament with Sachiko M, and I. S. O., with Sachiko M and Yoshimitsu Ichiraku. These groups abandoned the frenetic postmodern pastiche of Ground Zero, and emphasised small gestures and low volume. The music contained no samples, being made of sine waves and electroic clicks and hums. Yoshihide largely stopped using records as a sound source, instead manipulating the turntable itself with a wide variety of objects and contact microphones.

[edit] New Jazz Ensemble

At the end of the 1990s he founded Ōtomo 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 Ōtomo Yoshihide's New Jazz Quintet, has released "ONJQ LIVE" (2002), a collaboration with Tatsuya Oe entitled "ONJQ+OE" (2003), and "Tails Out" (2003). 2005 saw a release credited to the Ōtomo Yoshihide New Jazz Orchestra, the largest group thus far.

[edit] Other works

Ōtomo has also released duo albums with early experimental turntablist Christian Marclay ("Moving Parts", 2000) and another Japanese electronic musician, Nobukazu Takemura ("Turntables + Computers", 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). Featured in both pieces are Gagaku instruments, such as the sho, futozao-shamisen, and koto.

Ōtomo has worked with Jon Rose, Yamatsuka Eye of The Boredoms (as MC Hellshit & DJ Carhouse), Butch Morris, Voice Crack, Keith Rowe, Toshimaru Nakamura, Bill Laswell, John Zorn, Hikashu, Philip Jeck, Martin Tétreault, and poire z. Ōtomo was also part of an Australian / Japanese industrial outfit called Peril.