Aki Onda is an acclaimed electronic musician, composer, and multimedia artist, currently living in New York, who has curated this truly singular audiovisual experience, a showcase of innovative music and optical art from Japan.
Featured artists include: Atsuhiro Ito (pictured) whose original instrument, the Optron, a fluorescent light tube stuffed with small microphones, is manipulated like a guitar to generate intense, dynamic noises and bright flickering light; Kanta Horio whose work utilizes electromagnets, motors, contact microphones and a video camera to create simultaneous visual imagery; and Fuyuki Yamakawa who mixes the sounds of his own heartbeat, amplified by an electronic stethoscope, with a series of oscillating lights, themselves cadenced to the rhythm of his "Khoomei," a form of popular Tuvan (central Asian) overtone singing in which he excels.
Aki Onda rounds out the evening of acoustical experimentation with his solo performance which employs the distinctive field-recording sounds he records like a diary. In his performances, Onda literally plays his sound memories, physically manipulating Walkmans in a real-time, hands-on fashion, recollecting and re-composing pieces into a dreamy, evocative and often ritualistic sound.