Monat: Dezember 2025

247 Log 250903
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]

238 Log 250807 In Conversation with Toshie Kakinuma:
Jōji Yuasa, Takemitsu Tōru and Japanese Musique Concrète

September 16, 2025, Kunitachi Library, Tokyo

Toshie Kakinuma
Born in Shizuoka prefecture, Japan, Toshie Kakinuma is a distinguished musicologist, critic, and translator whose work centers on experimental and vocal music of the 20th and 21st centuries. She received her Bachelor of Music in Musicology from Kunitachi College of Music in 1977 and went on to complete her Master’s degree at Ochanomizu University in 1981. Pursuing further research abroad, she earned her Ph.D. in Music from the University of California, San Diego in 1989, where her doctoral studies focused on the American composer and instrument maker Harry Partch. Upon her return to Japan, Kakinuma held teaching positions at several institutions, including Meiji Gakuin University and Takushoku University, before joining the faculty of Kyoto City University of Arts as Professor of Musicology. At Kyoto, she also served as Director of the Archival Research Center, contributing significantly to the development of resources on contemporary Japanese and American music. Her scholarly interests encompass American experimentalism, modern Japanese composition, organology, and the intersections of sound, language, and the body. Kakinuma is the author of American Experimental Music as Ethnic Music (Film Art Sha, 2005) and The Birth of “Atonality” (Ongaku-no-tomo Sha, 2020, The 30th Yoshida Hidekazu Prize), has written extensively on figures such as Yūji Yuasa, Tōru Takemitsu, and Lou Harrison. In addition to her critical and scholarly output, she has produced influential Japanese translations of key 20th-century music texts, including John Cage’s Silence and Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise. When she wrote her essay “Yūji Yuasa and the Apparatus Called Language” (Ongaku Geijutsu, October 1984), Kakinuma was an emerging voice in Japan’s critical and academic circles, closely engaged with the evolving aesthetics of postwar vocal and electronic music.

In conversation with Toshie Kakinuma.pdf

Abstract
The conversation with musicologist and critic Toshie Kakinuma focuses on the vocal and electroacoustic works of Jōji Yuasa and Tōru Takemitsu, which she interprets as distinct Japanese articulations of musique concrète. Kakinuma situates these practices in dialogue with the European avant-garde – particularly Pierre Schaeffer, Luciano Berio, and Karlheinz Stockhausen – while emphasizing a critical divergence. Whereas Schaeffer’s concept of the objet sonore relies on analytical reduction and the suspension of linguistic meaning, Yuasa and Takemitsu pursue an approach that repositions the voice in a pre-semantic, corporeal register. The interview further addresses Kakinuma’s research on Takemitsu’s Vocal Trilogy, characterizing his engagement with musique concrète as explicitly anti-analytical. In contrast to European phonematic decomposition, Takemitsu conceives the voice as a bodily, everyday, and pre-aesthetic event, foregrounding experiential immediacy over structural abstraction.

Toshie Kakinuma:
Joji Yuasa and the Apparatus Called Language_Part I
Joji Yuasa and the Apparatus Called Language_Part II
Joji Yuasa and the Apparatus Called Language_Part III

196 Log 241001 Interview Trevor Wishart – Continuous Transformations of Sounds_not vocal in a vocal way

Interview with Trevor Wishart, York, October 13, 2024

Trevor Wishart (*1946, Leeds) is a British composer whose work has fundamentally expanded the concept of music through an exploration of sound, transformation, and the human voice. Trained in mathematics and music, Wishart became a leading figure in electroacoustic composition, developing a distinctive approach he termed sonic art – the organization of any sound material within a musical framework. Wishart has devoted much of his career to exploring the human voice as a source of musical material, using technology to transform and extend its expressive possibilities. Central to his practice is the idea of transformation: the continuous evolution of one sound into another, whether between speech and song, voice and environment, or human and machine. His music is often noted for its combination of technical innovation, political engagement, and imaginative sound design, establishing him as a central figure in contemporary electroacoustic composition.
From his early analogue works such as Machine and Red Bird to later computer-based compositions like Vox 5 and Encounters in the Republic of Heaven, Wishart has created immersive “oral images” that blur the boundary between the real and the imaginary. His innovative use of vocal techniques, spectral morphing, and spatialized sound has made him a pioneer of acousmatic and electroacoustic art. Beyond composition, Wishart’s writings – including On Sonic Art and Audible Design – have deeply influenced contemporary sound theory, redefining how we hear and think about sound as music.

In Conversation with Trevor Wishart.pdf

Abstract
The interview with the composer and theorist Trevor Wishart unfolds a practice- and perception-oriented reflection on electronic music, voice, and sound shaping that deliberately distances itself from work-centered, notation-based, and technologically deterministic models. Wishart situates his artistic practice within the framework of his theory of sonic art, in which music is understood as the organization of sound in perceptual time. At the center are sonic transformations that cannot be reduced to discrete pitches, symbolic structures, or fixed categories.
Particular attention is given to the voice, which Wishart understands as a paradigmatic model of continuous sonic change. Electronic technologies appear as tools for extending human perceptual and creative capacities. The interview makes clear that Wishart’s compositional thinking is shaped by a close interrelation of body, imagination, and technology. Moreover, Wishart reflects on musique concrète and its concept of écoute réduite. Rather than advocating an abstraction from the causes of sound, he argues for a mode of perception that incorporates the causal, energetic, and bodily dimensions of sound: “creating sounds that are ‘not vocal in a vocal way.’”

Trevor Wishart`s personal website
Borthwick Catalogue_Trevor Wishart Archive

131 Log 231006
Interview with David Bernstein 

October 6th, 2023
Littlefield Concert Hall
Mills College/Northeastern Campus

Professor of Music David Bernstein is an acclaimed scholar in Western Music Theory and current musicology. He is the editor of the renowned book on early electronic music: The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde. Professor Bernstein has also served as the Head of the Music Department at Mills College.

Interview David Bernstein_October 2023.pdf

Abstract
David Bernstein revisits the history of the San Francisco Tape Music Centre (SFTMC) after its move from Divisadero Street to Mills College. Bernstein describes the newly founded Centre for Contemporary Music (CCM) at Mills College as the ‘ground zero’ of experimental music on the West Coast. Compositions with tape machines and electronic devices are at the centre of music as a ‘community enterprise,’ of improvisational practices and ‘thinking in multiple temporalities.’ With the takeover of Mills College by Northeastern University, this is now a thing of the past.