#toshimaru nakamura

[garadinervi]

Xiang – Otomo Yoshihide, A Waiting Room Creation, (Limited Edition CD, Digital album), ftarri-924, Ftarri, 2026

Xiang: objects, violin, voice Otomo Yoshihide: objects, broken guitar, lips

Recorded by Xiang at Sichuan University, Chengdu, March 2025 Mastered by Toshimaru Nakamura

Cover Photo and Text: Xiang Design: Cathy Fishman

[dialoogid]

Various Artists - Improvised Music From Japan 2002-2003 (2002)

[schneeparts-musicblog]

Keith Rowe / Sachiko M / Toshimaru Nakamura / Otomo Yoshihide – ErstLive 005 [2005]

Onkyo; EAI

[reckonslepoisson]

Good Morning Good Night, Sachiko M / Toshimaru Nakamura / Otomo Yoshihide (2004)

No wonder Good Morning Good Night angers so many – music rarely tests the recorded form like this. Sachiko M, Nakamura and Yoshihide work their strains of experimentalism into the sounds of the everyday, intermingling life with digital buzz and vice versa. One’s experience is totally dictated by circumstance; so life shifts, as one never lives the same sounds twice, so no two listens of Good Morning Good Night are alike. 

[fauxparachute]

Toshimaru Nakamura (& his instrument, the "no-input mixing board")

... at a workshop Nakamura held about the no-input mixing board and improvisation, “a grad student asked him how much he practiced, to which he replied ‘I don’t!’ Incredulous, the grad student pressed him on it—surely he practiced; he was a musician. Toshi said something like ‘I play noise because I won’t make a mistake. I prefer to spend my time drinking beer with my friends.’”

[dustedmagazine]

Sound of the Mountain with Tetuzi Akiyama and Toshimaru Nakamura — Amplified Clarinet and Trumpet, Guitars, NIMB (Mystery and Wonder)

Photo by Akira Saito

When Macbeth’s witches incanted the words “Double, double, toil and trouble,” they might have been looking further into the future than the events recounted in William Shakespeare’s play. They might have been listening through a loophole in time to this CD, whose two tracks were recorded in Tokyo in October, 2017. Certainly, those words describe both the line-up of musicians involved and the sonic action that they brew.

Tetuzi Akiyama and Toshimaru Nakamura have been partners in sound since the days when Tokyo’s onkyo scene was perceived as a Pacific counterpoint to the near-silent improv that arose in Berlin and London. They’ve worked as a duo, and toured and recorded with a trio of Scandinavian horn players under the name Koboku Senju. While it’s tempting to compare that latter assemblage to the one on this CD, you’ll find more sonic differences than similarities. Sound of the Mountain is a Canadian duo comprising Elizabeth Millar on amplified clarinet and Craig Pedersen on amplified trumpet. Aside from their work with Akiyama and Nakamura, they’ve toured their native country, Mexico, and around the Pacific rim.  

The common ground that this combo builds from is refusal. Everyone here has decided, at least in each other’s presence, not to play their instruments the way that convention prescribes (caveat — Akimaya’s well-documented talent for boogieing requires acknowledgement that he can spank his plank in conventional ways with memorable results anytime he pleases). While the identity of his instrument is never in doubt, here his widely separate chords and sullen notes sound adrift in a sea of jagged sounds. Bored with his own music, Nakamura renounced guitar playing over twenty years ago in favor of working solely with a mixing board. By plugging the input into the output, the thing generates feedback. While Nakamura initially faced endless surprise from his instrument, he has developed considerable authority playing the thing, but his improvising aesthetic might still be characterized as system-oriented; by adding and subtracting sounds, he changes the overall character of the music without dominating it. Millar and Pedersen both use amplification to magnify the innards of their instruments, as well as to change their horns’ respective timbres. Both let slip some familiar tones, but squiggles, pops and huffs predominate.   

As the CD begins, the ensemble is already engaged. Keypads and electronics bubble around Akiyama’s serrated sounds, and the music proceeds from one metaphorical sound experience to the next. First, it’s a well-heated kettle, then a windblown forest at night, and later a congress of contrarian potlids. Another listener might reject such descriptions as needless filtering of the concrete fact that four people are making sounds that refrain from adhering to convention, yet cohere most grippingly.

Bill Meyer

[avantpanda]

Sound Of The Mountain with Toshimaru Nakamura and Tetuzi Akiyama live at Bar Robo in Ottawa, 2019/10/26.

Sorry about the obscured view.

[trackandhold]

Toshimaru Nakamura - No-Input Mixing Board (2000)