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onkyo

Onkyo

Japan · 1990s
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Description

Onkyo (also called onkyō-kei) is a Japanese approach to experimental, electroacoustic improvisation that centers on extremely quiet dynamics, sparse gestures, and the amplification of minute sonic events. Rather than focusing on melody, harmony, or pulse, it treats sound itself—hiss, hum, feedback, room tone, and the grain of instruments—as the primary material.

Performers often use no-input mixing boards, sine-wave samplers, laptops, contact microphones, and extended instrumental techniques to reveal fragile textures and near-silences. Long stretches of space and restraint invite deep listening, making the acoustic qualities of the venue and the audience’s presence integral to the music.

History
Origins and context

Onkyo emerged in late-1990s Tokyo as a response to both the high-energy noise scene and more gestural free improvisation. Its practitioners pursued radical quietude, microscopic detail, and attention to incidental sound, aligning with minimalist and reductionist currents elsewhere while retaining a distinctly Japanese sensibility. The term onkyō (音響) literally relates to sound/acoustics and reflects the movement’s focus on auditory phenomena over idiomatic musical syntax.

Key spaces, practices, and recordings

A crucial hub was the tiny Off Site venue in Tokyo, where musicians cultivated a shared language of near-silence, sine tones, and amplified micro-sounds. Practices such as the no‑input mixing board (routing a mixer’s outputs to its inputs to expose self-noise and feedback) and pure-tone sampling became emblematic. Collaborative albums and documentation—often issued by small Japanese labels and international imprints concerned with electroacoustic improvisation—helped codify the style.

Consolidation and international dialogue

By the early 2000s, onkyo was in dialogue with parallel movements like lowercase, microsound, and European reductionism. Cross-regional collaborations broadened its scope while reinforcing its core values: restraint, timbral focus, and site-specific listening. Although never a mass movement, it influenced adjacent fields such as sound art, field recording practice, and contemporary electroacoustic improvisation.

Legacy

Onkyo’s legacy lies in re-centering listening as a compositional act. Its insistence on space, ultra-low dynamics, and emergent texture helped shape electroacoustic improvisation (EAI) globally and continues to inform experimental performance practices that privilege environment, process, and the phenomenology of sound.

How to make a track in this genre
Setup and instrumentation
•   Use tools that expose subtle sonic behavior: no‑input mixing board, sine‑tone sampler, laptop with minimal DSP, contact mics, and traditional instruments played with extended techniques (e.g., guitar with eBow/soft preparations, bowed cymbals). •   Prioritize high‑quality amplification and full‑range monitors at low volume; the PA becomes part of the instrument.
Sound sources and material
•   Focus on near‑silences, system self‑noise, soft feedback, and micro‑gestures. Embrace incidental sounds (chair creaks, HVAC, audience breath) as material. •   Employ steady or slowly drifting sine tones, single partials, or narrow‑band noise to reveal beating patterns and room modes.
Structure and pacing
•   Build form through patience and subtraction: long spans of stillness punctuated by sparse events. One sound change can be the structural pivot. •   Avoid telegraphed climaxes; let small spectral shifts or spatial changes (moving a mic, altering gain by a few dB) function as development.
Dynamics, space, and interaction
•   Keep dynamics extremely low; micro‑dynamics (±1–3 dB) matter. Leave ample silence to frame each gesture. •   Use the room as a collaborator: tune sine frequencies to standing waves, place speakers to excite or null specific nodes, and reposition sound sources to reshape the field. •   In ensemble settings, practice “collective restraint”: one player sounding at a time, or overlapping only when timbres fuse transparently.
Documentation and performance practice
•   Record with sensitive microphones and high headroom at low gain; avoid heavy noise reduction that erases intentional system noise. •   Treat rehearsal as listening training—test how tiny parameter changes read in the space before adding more material.
Main artists
Influenced by
Free Improvisation
Free improvisation is a practice of spontaneous music-making that avoids fixed idioms, stylistic templates, and pre-agreed structures. Musicians prioritize listening, interaction, and the exploration of sound itself—timbre, texture, dynamics, and silence—over conventional melody, harmony, or pulse. Guitarist Derek Bailey popularized the notion of "non-idiomatic improvisation," describing a music that deliberately resists falling into recognizable genre habits. While often overlapping with free jazz and contemporary classical experimentalism, free improvisation is not confined to either. It welcomes any instrument or sound source—acoustic, electronic, or everyday objects—and frequently uses extended techniques, feedback, and unconventional performance gestures. Performances can range from whisper-quiet, pointillistic interplay to ferocious, high-energy noise, with the ensemble shaping form in real time through attention and constraint.
Electroacoustic
Electroacoustic music is a broad art-music tradition that integrates recorded acoustic sound and electronically generated or processed sound into coherent musical works. It privileges timbre, gesture, texture, and spatialization over conventional melody-and-harmony song forms, often employing tape manipulation, synthesis, live electronics, and computer-based signal processing. Works are frequently composed for fixed media (stereo or multichannel loudspeakers) and may also involve live performers who are transformed in real time. Concert presentation typically emphasizes spatial diffusion and immersive listening, and the repertoire spans concert works, radio pieces, installations, and soundscape compositions.
Minimalism
Minimalism is a style of Western art music that emerged in the United States during the 1960s, characterized by the use of very limited musical materials, steady pulse, and extensive repetition. Composers often build pieces from short cells or motifs that are repeated and slowly transformed through additive or subtractive processes, phase shifting, and gradual changes in harmony, texture, or register. Harmony is typically consonant (often modal or diatonic), though just intonation and extended drones are also common. The result is music that foregrounds process, clarity, audibility of structure, and a hypnotic sense of stasis and flow. Typical ensembles include keyboards, mallet percussion, strings, winds, voices, and electronics or tape. Minimalism influenced a wide array of later styles, from ambient and new age to post-minimalism and minimal techno.
Lowercase
Lowercase is a minimalist strain of experimental ambient music that privileges extremely quiet, often barely-perceptible sound. Instead of melody and rhythm, it focuses on micro-sonic details—hiss, hums, room tone, paper rustle, HVAC drones, cable buzz, and distant environmental traces—presented at very low volumes. Coined by artist Steve Roden in the early 2000s, the term denotes both a sonic aesthetic and a listening practice: attentive, headphone-based, and patient. Releases frequently use long durations, wide dynamic range, and near-silence to pull listeners toward the threshold of audibility. Labels such as 12k, LINE, and Trente Oiseaux, along with galleries and sound-art contexts, helped situate lowercase at the intersection of ambient, electroacoustic composition, and conceptual sound art.
Reductionism
Reductionism is a strand of experimental and improvised music that pursues extreme restraint, quiet dynamics, and a focus on micro‑sound. Rather than foregrounding melody, harmony, or steady pulse, it prioritizes timbre, texture, and the audibility of small gestures, room tone, and silence. Performances typically unfold at very low volumes with sparse events and long stretches of near‑inaudibility. Players use extended techniques, feedback, contact microphones, inside‑piano preparations, sine tones, and no‑input mixers to reveal subtle sonic details. Silence is treated as musical material, and the performance space itself becomes part of the instrument. The result is a heightened, forensic listening situation in which the smallest action—bow hair noise, cable hum, breath through a mouthpiece—can reorganize the entire sound field.
Microsound
Microsound is an experimental electronic music aesthetic that focuses on sound at extremely small time scales, often in the range of milliseconds. Rather than developing melodies and rhythms in the conventional sense, it foregrounds the grain, texture, and morphology of audio—clicks, cuts, sine blips, static, and near-silent filigree—arranged with surgical precision. Heavily shaped by digital signal processing and granular/spectral techniques, microsound treats errors, residual noise, and computational artifacts as musical material. The results are sparse, highly dynamic soundfields that emphasize detail, negative space, and the sensation of listening under a microscope. The style sits at the intersection of glitch, ambient, electroacoustic composition, and minimalism, and it is frequently associated with labels and artists who advanced “post-digital” aesthetics in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Ambient
Ambient is a form of electronic and electroacoustic music that prioritizes tone, atmosphere, and texture over conventional song structures and rhythmic drive. It typically features slow-moving harmonies, sustained drones, gentle timbral shifts, and extensive use of space and silence. Rather than drawing attention to itself through hooks or beats, ambient is designed to be as ignorable as it is interesting, rewarding both background listening and focused immersion. Artists often employ synthesizers, samplers, tape loops, field recordings, and subtle acoustic instruments, with reverb and delay creating a sense of place. Substyles range from luminous, consonant soundscapes to darker, more dissonant atmospheres.
Experimental Electronic
Experimental electronic is an umbrella term for electronic music that foregrounds exploration and innovation over convention. It treats the studio, computer, and synthesizer as laboratories, using techniques such as tape manipulation, modular and software synthesis, feedback systems, granular and spectral processing, algorithmic/generative composition, circuit-bending, and field recording. Rather than regular song forms or dancefloor functionality, it prioritizes timbre, texture, space, and process. Structures may be nonlinear or open-form; harmony is often non-functional or drone-based; rhythm can be free, irregular, or machine-deconstructed. The style overlaps with electroacoustic music, sound art, industrial, ambient, and noise while continually interfacing with club culture and contemporary art contexts.
Eai
EAI (Electroacoustic Improvisation) is a largely quiet, reductionist form of free improvisation in which musicians sculpt sound in real time using electronics, extended techniques, and the ambient characteristics of the room itself. Instead of melody, harmony, or steady pulse, the music focuses on texture, timbre, micro‑dynamics, and silence. Sine tones, feedback, contact microphones, tabletop guitars, and laptops often replace traditional instrumental roles. The result is an austere, highly attentive music that treats each sound—however small—as a structural event. EAI is frequently associated with the late‑1990s Tokyo onkyo scene and parallel European reductionist circles. Performances are typically intimate, with players listening as much as playing, privileging restraint, duration, and the sonic grain of materials.
Experimental
Experimental music is an umbrella term for practices that prioritize exploration, process, and discovery over adherence to established genre norms. It embraces new sound sources, nonstandard tuning systems, indeterminacy and chance operations, graphic and open-form scores, extended techniques, and technology-led sound design (tape, electronics, computers, and live processing). Rather than a single style, it is a methodology and ethos: testing hypotheses about sound, structure, and performance, often blurring boundaries between composition, improvisation, sound art, and performance art. Listeners can expect unfamiliar timbres, unusual forms, and an emphasis on how music is made as much as the resulting sound.
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