Toshimaru Nakamura is a Japanese musician, active in free improvisation and Japanese onkyo. Free improvisation or free music is improvised music without any rules beyond the taste of the musicians involved, and not in any particular style. ... Onkyo is a Japanese consumer electronics maker specialising in home audio equipment. ...
He is unique in using a mixing console as a live, interactive musical instrument: "Nakamura plays the 'no-input mixing board', connecting the input of the board to the output, then manipulating the resultant audio feedback." [1] BBC Local Radio Mark III radio mixing desk In professional audio, a mixing console, mixing desk (Brit. ... A musical instrument is a device that has been constructed or modified with the purpose of making music. ... Audio feedback (also known as the Larson effect) is a special kind of feedback which occurs when a loop exists between an audio input (for example, a microphone or guitar pickup) and an audio output (for example, a loudspeaker). ...
Nakamura's music has been described as "sounds ranging from piercing high tones and shimmering whistles to galumphing, crackle-spattered bass patterns." [2]
Nakamura has recorded solo albums, and has collaborated with Otomo Yoshihide and Keith Rowe, among others. Otomo Yoshihide (born August 1, 1959) is a Japanese experimental musician. ... Keith Rowe is a British free improvisation guitarist. ...
External Links
Toshimaru Nakamura Home Page
Toshimaru Nakamura: Sound Student, interviewed by by William Meyer (July 2003)
Nakamura started out playing guitar, but in 1997 he put it aside and began playing the mixing board.
Like Nakamura, Kahn is a reductionist; he's cut back from the full drum kit he used to play with Universal Congress Of to a traveling set-up that includes just a couple percussive instruments, some effects, and a laptop.
Nakamura has been a key player in Erstwhile's recent AMPLIFY festivals, which were held in Tokyo and New York, and he should be all over the boxed set documenting the former event that the label is scheduled to release this fall.
As the title indicates, ToshimaruNakamura's instrument of choice is a mixing board sans input.
Formerly a guitarist, he expressed the desire to move away from any sense of traditional "feeling" in his music and there is a certain alien quality to the pieces here, a thrumming that might seem to owe more to the interaction of galvanized metals than to human thought.
Part of the magic wrought by Nakamura (shown perhaps to even greater effect in his duo with Sachiko M., Do on Erstwhile) is the ability to conjure up a rich, hitherto unknown world of sound from such an apparently barren fount.
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