Yoshihide Otomo
is a Japanese composer and multi-instrumentalist. He mainly plays guitar, turntables and electronics. He first came to international prominence in the 1990s as the leader of the experimental rock group Ground Zero, and has since worked in a variety of contexts, ranging from free improvisation to noise, jazz, avant-garde and contemporary classical. He is also a pioneering figure in the EAI-scene, and is featured on important records on labels like Erstwhile Records. He has composed music for many films, television dramas, and commercials. In 2017, Otomo became the 2nd Guest Artistic Director of The Sapporo International Art Festival 2017. Biography Early years Otomo was born in Yokohama in 1959, but due to his father's job, moved to Fukushima when he was nine years old. In high school, he frequented jazz cafés and started his own band. After entering university, he began studying under the improvisational jazz guitarist, Masayuki Takayanagi. He began performing around th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Weikersheim
Weikersheim is a town in the Main-Tauber district of Baden-Württemberg, Germany. History Town rights were granted to Weikersheim in 1313. As one of the seats of the House of Hohenlohe, until 1756 Weikersheim's town center was dominated by Weikersheim Castle, residence of the Hohenlohe-Weikersheim line. During the process of German mediatization from 1806 to 1809, Weikersheim was awarded to the Kingdom of Württemberg, whose government assigned the city to . In 1938, the Oberamt was reorganized as , under whose jurisdiction Weikersheim remained. From 1 January 1972 to 1 January 1975, Weikersheim incorporated eight municipalities. In that time, , and as a result Weikersheim was assigned to the newly created Main-Tauber district. In 2000, the old town and palace were placed under protection as cultural monuments. Geography The township ('' Stadt'') of Weikersheim covers of the Main-Tauber district of Baden-Württemberg, a state of the Federal Republic of Germany. Weikersheim ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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COMMONNAME
A common name, in the nomenclature of biology, is a name of a taxon or organism based on the normal language of everyday life. Common name may also refer to: * Common name (chemistry) (also: trivial name), non-systematic name for a chemical * Common noun in linguistics, noun that refers to a class of entities rather than a unique entity * CN (or "common name") in cryptography, part of an X.509 attribute certificate See also * Generic name (other) {{disambiguation ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Masayuki Takayanagi
was a Japanese jazz / free improvisation / noise musician. He was active in the Japanese jazz scene from the late 1950s. In the 1960s he formed New Direction (later New Direction Unit), which recorded several albums throughout the 1970s. He also recorded several albums with saxophonist Kaoru Abe, including ''Kaitai Teki Kohkan'', ''Gradually Projection'' and ''Mass Projection''. New Direction (a trio with Motoharu Yoshizawa and Yoshisaburo Toyozumi) started to perform in 1969. The absence of melody and rhythm in their playing, together with their volume, meant that their early performance opportunities were largely limited to the jazz coffee shop Nagisa in Tokyo. One attendee wrote: "The sound was so loud that the paint on the ceiling, shaken by the vibration, would flake off and fall like snow on the heads of the audience." Takayanagi sometimes dragged a metal chain over the guitar strings and hit them with a stick. His instructions to the rest of the trio were: "Play forte at ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Jazz Kissa
Jazz kissa (), sometimes transliterated as jazu kissa, are cafés that specialise in the playing and appreciation of recorded jazz music. Unique to Japan, jazz kissa are spaces where jazz music is played for dedicated listening rather than as background music. A typical jazz kissa features a high-quality stereo system, a large music collection and dim lighting, and serves coffee and alcoholic drinks. The first cafés focussed on playing recorded jazz opened in Japan in the late 1920s as part of a wider enthusiasm for Western culture and music. Before World War II there were about 80 jazz kissa, but during the war many of them closed. The post-war period saw jazz kissa return in even greater numbers. Jazz kissa served as places to hear imported jazz records that were too expensive for individuals to buy. They were an important musical resource for musicians, journalists and jazz enthusiasts, and, at their peak, there were around 600 jazz kissa operating across Japan. Starti ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Fukushima, Fukushima
is the capital Cities of Japan, city of Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. It is located in the northern part of the Nakadōri, central region of the prefecture. , the city had an estimated population of 275,850 in 122,130 households and a population density of . The total area of the city is . The present-day city of Fukushima partially consists of most of the former Shinobu District, Fukushima, Shinobu and Date District, Fukushima, Date Districts and a portion of the former Adachi District, Fukushima, Adachi District. The city is located in the Fukushima Basin's southwest area and nearby mountains. There are many onsen on the outskirts of the city, including the resort areas of Iizaka Onsen, Takayu Onsen, and Tsuchiyu Onsen. Fukushima is also the location of the Fukushima Race Course, the only Japan Racing Association horse racing track in the Tōhoku region of Japan. History Early history In ancient Japan, the area now known as Fukushima City was called . The mountain in the midd ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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The Sapporo International Art Festival
''The'' is a grammatical article in English, denoting nouns that are already or about to be mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with nouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of the archaic pronoun ''thee'') ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Electroacoustic Improvisation
Live electronic music (also known as live electronics) is a form of music that can include traditional electronic sound-generating devices, modified electric musical instruments, hacked sound generating technologies, and computers. Initially the practice developed in reaction to sound-based composition for fixed media such as musique concrète, electronic music and early computer music. Musical improvisation often plays a large role in the performance of this music. The timbres of various sounds may be transformed extensively using devices such as amplifiers, filters, ring modulators and other forms of circuitry. Real-time generation and manipulation of audio using live coding is now commonplace. History 1800s–1940s Early electronic instruments Early electronic instruments intended for live performance, such as Thaddeus Cahill's Telharmonium (1897) and instruments developed between the two world wars, such as the Theremin (1919), Spharophon (1924), ondes Martenot (1928), and ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Contemporary Classical Music
Contemporary classical music is Western art music composed close to the present day. At the beginning of the 21st-century classical music, 21st century, it commonly referred to the post-1945 Modernism (music), post-tonal music after the death of Anton Webern, and included serial music, electronic music, experimental music, and minimalist music. Newer forms of music include spectral music and ''Postminimalism#Music, post-minimalism''. History Background At the beginning of the 20th century, composers of classical music were experimenting with an increasingly Consonance and dissonance, dissonant pitch language, which sometimes yielded atonality, atonal pieces. Following World War I, as a backlash against what they saw as the increasingly exaggerated gestures and formlessness of late Romanticism, certain composers adopted a Neoclassicism (music), neoclassic style, which sought to recapture the balanced forms and clearly perceptible thematic processes of earlier styles (see als ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Avant-garde
In the arts and literature, the term ''avant-garde'' ( meaning or ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an ''advance guard'' identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus, the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times. As a stratum of the intelligentsia of a society, avant-garde artists promote progressive and radical politics and advocate for societal reform with and through works of art. In the essay "The Artist, the Scientist, and the Industrialist" (1825), Benjamin Olinde Rodrigues's political usage of ''vanguard'' identified the moral obligation of artists to "ser ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Its roots are in blues, ragtime, European harmony, African rhythmic rituals, spirituals, hymns, marches, vaudeville song, and dance music. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. However, jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Free Improvisation
Free improvisation or free music is improvised music without any general rules, instead following the intuition of its performers. The term can refer to both a technique—employed by any musician in any genre—and as a recognizable genre of experimental music in its own right. Free improvisation, as a genre of music, developed primarily in the U.K. as well as the U.S. and Europe in the mid to late 1960s, largely as an outgrowth of free jazz and contemporary classical music. Exponents of free improvised music include saxophonists Evan Parker, Anthony Braxton, Peter Brötzmann, and John Zorn, composer Pauline Oliveros, trombonist George E. Lewis, guitarists Derek Bailey, Henry Kaiser and Fred Frith, bassists Damon Smith and Jair-Rohm Parker Wells and the improvising groups Spontaneous Music Ensemble and AMM. Characteristics In the context of music theory, free improvisation denotes the shift from a focus on harmony and structure to other dimensions of music, su ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Experimental Rock
Experimental rock, also called avant-rock, is a subgenre of rock music that pushes the boundaries of common composition and performance technique or which experiments with the basic elements of the genre. Artists aim to liberate and innovate, with some of the genre's distinguishing characteristics being improvisational performances, avant-garde influences, odd instrumentation, opaque lyrics (or instrumentals), unorthodox structures and rhythms, and an underlying rejection of commercial aspirations. From its inception, rock music was experimental, but it was not until the late 1960s that rock artists began creating extended and complex compositions through advancements in multitrack recording. In 1967, the genre was as commercially viable as pop music, but by 1970, most of its leading players had incapacitated themselves in some form. In Germany, the krautrock subgenre merged elements of improvisation and psychedelic rock with electronic music, avant-garde and contemporary classi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |