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In Conversation with Tomomi Adachi

29 September, 2025, Kanazawa

Tomomi Adachi
born in 1972 in Kanagawa is a Japanese composer, performer, voice artist, and instrument builder known for his experimental approach to sound and performance. His work spans extended vocal techniques, sound poetry, live electronics, and the construction of original electronic instruments and sensor-based devices. Adachi frequently collaborates across disciplines, creating works that merge music, technology, theatre, and media art. He has performed internationally, composed for ensembles and multimedia settings, and served as a guest artist and lecturer in Europe, the United States, and Asia. His practice often explores the intersections of notation and improvisation, body and technology, and voice and electronics.

Abstract
This text proposes a critical re-reading of Japanese sound poetry through the intersecting lenses of voice, tape, and technological mediation. Drawing on archival research, historical reconstruction, and an extended interview with Tomomi Adachi, the text traces episodic constellations of practice – from prewar futurist phonetic experiments associated with MAVO, through postwar figures such as Suzuki Shiroyasu and Niikuni Seiichi, to Fluxus-related sound and media art.
Central to the argument is the role of recording technologies – wire recorders, magnetic tape, radio studios, and later digital systems – not merely as tools of documentation but as epistemic frameworks that reshape vocal articulation, authorship, and performativity. The essay situates Japanese sound poetry at the threshold between literature, music, and performance, emphasizing non-semantic vocality, corporeal articulation, and the instability of notation. The text frames Adachi’s contemporary practices like live electronics, DIY instruments, 3D textual objects, and AI-generated voices, as a continuation of these concerns, in which voice emerges as both bodily event and technological artifact. Rather than positioning Japanese sound poetry as a derivative counterpart to European models, the essay argues for its constitutive role within a transnational history of vocal and media-based experimentation.

In Conversation with Tomomi Adachi.pdf

Adachi Tomomi’s personal website [accessed 13.12.2025]