Yasunao Tone, the avant-garde composer and artist who was a key participant within the Japanese wing of the Fluxus motion, died in a New York hospital on Monday, Could 12, The New York Times experiences. Tone co-founded the influential music and artwork outfits Group Ongaku and Group Random in Tokyo, earlier than transferring to New York within the early Seventies and increasing his glitch music and multimedia artwork apply alongside contemporaries comparable to Yoko Ono. He was 90 years outdated.
Tone specialised in dadaist and surrealist literature at Tokyo’s Chiba College. Alongside his research, he performed saxophone in experimental bands and, shortly after graduating, fashioned Group Ongaku with collaborators together with Mieko Shiomi and the late Takehisa Kosugi. In New York, he collaborated with the Merce Cunningham Dance Firm, of which Kosugi would turn out to be director in 1995, and composed radical solo music in a method he conceived in a 1961 essay as “Anti-Music.” This was a core Fluxus precept: demystifying music and artwork objects—and within the course of the digital media that carries them—to discover “the system of music itself,” as he put it in a 1997 interview. “We use a sort of method that can be utilized by any lay individuals. It doesn’t require any particular coaching. That’s basically a Fluxus philosophy.”
Tone’s work with scratched CDs within the mid-Eighties drew consideration past artwork circles, utilizing glitches and digital manipulation to undermine the precision of digital media. His avant-garde data and performances anticipated the digital brinksmanship of vital Nineteen Nineties labels like Warp and Mille Plateaux; in that period, Tone continued to launch ahead music, such because the landmark 1997 noise album Solo for Wounded. His work in music and artwork areas continued into latest years, together with two lengthy items launched in 2017, AI Deviation #1 and #2, that utilized his strategies to synthetic intelligence.
