Yoshi Wada
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Yoshi Wada (surname Wada; born Yoshimasa Wada, Japan) is a sound installation artist and musician living in the United States. He lived in New York for many years but now lives in San Francisco, California.[1]
Wada received an arts degree, then joined the Fluxus movement in 1968 after meeting George Maciunas.[2] He also studied with the great North Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath. Wada's works often incorporate the use of drone and are usually performed at very high volume, allowing for the music's overtones to be heard very clearly.
He frequently performs his own compositions, which feature much freedom of improvisation, on Scottish highland bagpipe and voice, and also employs a number of homemade instruments. These include "pipe horns" (very long horn-type instruments made from metal plumbing pipe) as well as large reed instruments involving multiple bagpipe-like pipes connected to a large air compressor; due to their appearance, Wada named these latter instruments "Alligator" and "the Elephantine Crocodile". His music has been scarcely released on recordings, having seen only two LP releases, on the India Navigation (1982) and FMP[3] labels, the former of which (entitled Lament For The Rise and Fall of Elephantine Crocodile) was reissued by a Japanese label in 2008.[4]
Wada is also known for his mechanical and robotic installations. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the mid-1990s, he performed a whimsically entitled piece, Lament for the Rise and Fall of Handy-Horn, in which several compressed-air "auditory flare" signals used for nautical emergencies (the "Handy Horn" brand named in the title) were sounded for the duration of their usefulness, giving rise to an alarmingly high-decibel air-pressure environment and charged psychoacoustic environment.
[edit] References
- Johnson, Tom (1989). The Voice of New Music: New York City 1972-1982 -- A Collection of Articles Originally Published by the Village Voice. Eindhoven, Netherlands: Het Apollohuis. ISBN 90-71638-09-X. Available for free download at: [5]
