Japanoise

, a portmanteau of "Japanese" and "noise", is the distinctively intense and experimental style of noise music that emerged in Japan from the late 1970s onward. Nick Cain of The Wire identifies the

History#

On May 8, 1960, six young Japanese musicians, including Takehisa Kosugi and Yasunao Tone, formed the Group Ongaku with two tape recordings of noise music: Automatism and Object. These recordings made use of a mixture of traditional musical instruments along with a vacuum cleaner, a radio, an oil drum, a doll, and a set of dishes. Moreover, the speed of the tape recording was manipulated, further distorting the sounds being recorded. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Merzbow took Lou Reed’s album Metal Machine Music as a point of departure and further abstracted the noise aesthetic by freeing the sound from guitar based feedback alone, a development that is thought to have heralded noise music as a genre. According to Paul Hegarty (2007), “In many ways it only makes sense to talk of noise music since the advent of various types of noise produced in Japanese music, and in terms of quantity this is really to do with the 1990s onwards … . With the vast growth of Japanese noise, finally, noise music becomes a genre”.

Prominent artists#

Hijokaiden
Merzbow (Masama Akita)
Onkyokei
List of Japanoise artists Other key Japanese noise artists that contributed to this upsurge of activity include Boredoms, C.C.C.C., Incapacitants, KK Null, Yamazaki Maso, Solmania, K2, The Gerogerigegege, , Ruins and Hanatarash. During the 1990s, the scene also began to gain recognition overseas, as artists such as Sonic Youth and John Zorn introduced many Japanoise performers to American audiences.

Genre family: 20th-century music genres, Japanese styles of music, Noise music