Otomo Yoshihide
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, film score 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 guitarist Derek Bailey, saxophonist Kaoru Abe and guitarist Masayuki Takayanagi (from whom he took lessons).
Otomo studied at the Meiji University from 1979, where he studied ethnomusicology, concentrating on the Japanese pop music of 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 works. In 1981, Otomo began improvising in clubs (Jazu Kissa), performing on guitar and also using tapes and electronics.
Ground Zero
Otomo began to release records in the late 1980s and has been very prolific, working in a variety of styles and collaborating with a wide 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 described 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 is continuously repeated throughout the single hour-long track while the band improvise around it, becoming louder, and eventually swamping the sample out.
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 electronic 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.
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 (Captain Funk) entitled ONJQ+OE (2003), and Tails Out (2003). 2005 saw a release credited to the Ōtomo Yoshihide New Jazz Orchestra, his largest group thus far.
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 pieces that are sine wave-based or made from samples, and Anode (2001), a group improvisation where the players are constrained by certain pre-determined rules (similar in some respects to John Zorn's game pieces). Featured in both pieces are Gagaku instruments, such as the sho, futozao-shamisen, and koto.
Ōtomo has worked with Jon Rose, Yamatsuka Eye of 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.
There is also an album by Kenny Millions & Otomo Yoshihide, Without Kuryokhin, released in 1998 and dedicated to the memory of Russian jazz and experimental musician Sergey Kuryokhin.