Onkyo

Onkyo (Japanese for 'sound, reverberation') describes a Tokyo improvisation practice in which performers work at very low volumes and with deliberately impoverished sound sources. Toshimaru Nakamura's no-input mixing board generates its material from a mixer's own feedback loop with no external signal; Sachiko M plays sine waves through a sampler with no samples; Taku Sugimoto's electric guitar is often barely audible scrape and rattle. There is no beat, almost no melody, and many performances contain extended passages where nothing is intentionally sounded. The aesthetic is the opposite of the volume-as-violence pole of Japanese noise (Merzbow, Hijokaidan).

Onkyo coalesced around 1998 in a handful of small Tokyo venues — Off Site in Yoyogi was the central room — with players including Nakamura, Sachiko M, Sugimoto, Tetuzi Akiyama, and Otomo Yoshihide. It came out of a conversation with the European EAI (electroacoustic improvisation) circuit around Erstwhile Records and the German label Grob, and is contemporary with Vienna's Polwechsel and the Berlin reductionists. The English term 'onkyo' as a genre label was largely applied by Western critics; in Japan players tended to just call it kaiteki ongaku or improvisation.

Set the volume so quiet sounds are at the edge of audibility and don't raise it when nothing seems to be happening. The information lives in tiny pitch beating between sine waves, in the breath before a guitar string is touched, in the room tone of the venue itself. Recordings vary in how loud the room is; some Off Site documents are essentially silent at normal listening volume.

Toshimaru Nakamura, 'No-Input Mixing Board' (2000). For the duo language, Sachiko M and Toshimaru Nakamura, 'do' (Erstwhile, 2001).

Off Site, the Tokyo venue most associated with onkyo, was the front room of an architecture office — performers had to play quietly enough not to disturb the neighbours, which is widely cited as a practical reason the music's aesthetic came out the way it did.