was a Japanese multidisciplinary artist born in Tokyo, Japan, and working in New York City. He graduated from Chiba University in 1957 with a major in Japanese Literature. An important figure in postwar Japanese art during the 1960s, he was active in many facets of the Tokyo art scene. He was a central member of the early noise music collective Group Ongaku and was associated with a number of other Japanese art groups such as Neo-Dada Organizers, Hi-Red Center, and Team Random (the first computer art group organized in Japan).

Tone was also a member of Fluxus and one of the founding members of its Japanese branch. Many of his works were performed at Fluxus festivals or distributed by George Maciunas’s various Fluxus operations. Relocating to the United States in 1972, he henceforth gained a reputation as a musician, performer and writer working with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Senda Nengudi, Florian Hecker, and many others. Tone is also known as a pioneer of "Glitch" music due to his groundbreaking modifications of compact discs and CD players.

Tone died on 12 May 2025, at the age of 90.

Early life in Tokyo

While in high-school Tone became interested in Japanese Avant-Garde poetry and prose of the 1920s and 30s. During this time, Tone was particularly influenced by Assistant Professor Tsuneyoshi Shigenobu and the instructor Isamu Kurita. Tone then wrote his thesis on Dada and Surrealism, interviewing many of the prominent figures of the 20th century avant-garde in Japan in the process such as Katsue Kitazono, Shūzō Takiguchi, Kōichi Kihara, and Sansei Yamanaka.

Group Ongaku and other early artistic activity

In the late 1950s, Shūko Mizuno, Tone’s classmate at Chiba University enrolled at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku, abbrev. Geidai) and began musically improvising with classmate Takehisa Kosugi. Kosugi played a tape for Tone and asked him to join their sessions. According to his own account, Tone saw music as lagging behind the experimentation present in other art forms of the time and therefore providing a rich ground for the transformative capacity of art.

Tone also wrote about the group, first in August of 1960 where he emphasized the role of chance and their endeavoring in “an experiment concerning an absolutely new music.” As Marotti points out, this emphasis on chance was part of Tone's and the group’s exploration of a Surrealist-inspired automatism in opposition to artistic egoism. The group’s improvisational approach to collective art making therefore had wider theoretical consequences for the social import of art. Inseparable from this work is its contextualization within the massive protests against the renewal of U.S.-Japan Security treaty (abbreviated as Anpo), as seen in their performance from the van of Tone’s family’s business during the Anpo protests.

Among his early influences, Tone cited Concrete Music, John Cage’s experiments with sound, Jackson Pollock’s action painting, and Art autre/Art informel. A former literature major, Tone became a fixture within the Japanese contemporary art scene. Tone was involved with the Neo Dadaism Organizers group, attending and sometimes participating in their events such as those conducted at Masunobu Yoshimura’s “White House” in Shinjuku, In the early sixties he became involved with the international Fluxus movement. For example, his 1961 score Anagram for Strings was published and distributed by George Maciunas’s Fluxus Editions in 1963. This work was Tone’s first graphic score, and it was performed during the first Fluxus festival, a 1962 tour around Europe. Dasha Dekleva describes the score, writing that it “is populated with small white and black circles and dots, and with random whole numbers (positive and negative) along the top and left edges. The realization of the piece involves drawing a line across the score and using basic arithmetic calculations that determine how a series of downward glissando is to be performed.” Among other shorter scores, Anagram for Strings was translated to English by Yoko Ono. In this work, Tone stood elevated on a ladder above an open piano. He then took various handheld objects such as a tennis ball or cork and dropped them one-by-one onto the exposed strings. Tone and Kosugi were supposed to meet up with the primary group at Ikebukuro, but the primary group ended their performance prematurely when Nakanishi became too nervous to continue. The work was initially a reel to reel tape recorder which, after some uncertainty, he painted in hopes of making it a more acceptable submission to the art exhibition. The following year, the final year of the Yomiuri Independent, Tone produced Something Happened (1963). Acquiring the stereotype mold of the Yomiuri newspaper (the exhibition sponsor) published that day, Tone rendered the news in plaster. Around this time Tone also frequented the events at the Sōgetsu Art Center. It was here that Tone met Nam June Paik, who had been working in Tokyo with Shūya Abe between Summer of 1963 and Spring of 1964.

Criticism and theory

Tone was also a prolific and important writer and theorist of art. In his 1961 “Toward Anti-Music,” for example, he describes a progression in Western music from “musical tone” to “abstract music.” From here it outlines its logical successor as “concrete music” in European musique concrète and American “indeterminate music,” invoking John Cage. This articulation of a new idiom received textual form in “Chronology: Five Decades of Contemporary Art, 1916-1968” in 1972. For this text, Tone, along with Naoyoshi Hikosaka and Yukio Akatsuka, compiled a history of Japanese contemporary art, published in Bijutsu Techo. Tone was an important friend and influence upon Hikosaka, an important progenitor of conceptualism in Japan. Tone’s role as an influential theorist for young Japanese contemporary artists can be observed in his relationship Hikosaka more generally, to whom he introduced the works of Fluxus and John Cage as well as the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. It was Tone who also suggested that Hikosaka use latex as the material for his important 1970 Floor Event piece instead of the conventional art material of plaster, and who assisted in the work by pressing the shutter button on the 35 millimeter camera as Hikosaka brushed the latex over the floor of his home.

In 1970 Tone compiled and published a book of his writing titled Gendai geijutsu no isō.

The exhibition was conceived by Tone in response to the closure of the Yomiuri Independent, which was, according to Tomii, “the principle forum of anti-Art” and whose closure “prompted discussion of the dependency of vanguard artists on the corporate-sponsored ‘independent.’” One entry to the Tone Prize Exhibition was Hi-Red Center’s canonical Cleaning Event (1964), a work that Tone participated in himself.

Activity in the United States (1972–2025)

In 1972, Tone went to Mills College in Oakland, California to perform at the event “Repetition and Structure: Works of Yasunao Tone 1961-1964.” The first turned at a rate of one revolution per second, the second one per minute, and the last turntable one per hour. The work was commissioned by the American Dance Festival in Durham for Cunningham’s Roadrunners. The piece comprised a text, a notation for two amplified string instruments (derived from the tablature of ninth-century Chinese pipa music, and a gated audio system. The work features the reading of passages from a late 10th century Chinese encyclopedia, describing various foreign places and people. Tone described the process for producing his album Musica Iconologos as such: “first, the material source of the piece was derived from the poetic text of ancient China and each character of the text was converted into photographic images according to the ancient form of the Chinese characters which are closer to images than the modern form. I scanned the images and digitized them, thus the images were transformed simply into 0’s and 1’s. Then, I obtained histograms from the binary codes and had the computer read the histograms as sound waves; thus I got sound from the images.” For example, “Solar Eclipse in October,” a poem composed of 262 early Chinese characters was turned into half an hour of experimental, chance-driven sound. A similar method was employed for Musica Simulacra, debuted in 2003, which took the Man’yoshu collection of poems of the 7th and 8th centuries as its source material. His collaboration with Florian Hecker, Palimpsest, also transliterated Japanese Man'yōshū poems to sound.

As Tone noted, Musica Iconologos was developed specifically for the medium of compact disc. He wrote, “I had received an offer to publish a CD; however, none of my pieces were suitable for recording. Certain formal elements of the pieces—spatial movement of sound, contrasting acoustic sound with amplified sound, and the use of visuals—made the pieces simply unrecordable. So I had to create something totally devoid of live performance, something that only the CD as a medium could produce.” Because the musician’s hand is removed in Musica Iconologos, it can only be played and never performed. The compact disc as a means of dissemination and presentation were therefore integral to the production of the work itself.

Tone began manipulating compact discs to achieve uniquely mangled sounds in 1984. Tone's CD-player-based works employ a process of "de-controlling" the device's playback so that it randomly selects fragments from a set of sound materials. Tone stated that the error-correction functionality of modern CD players made it hard to continue to use this technique and, for this reason, he continued to use older equipment.

In March 1986, Tone performed Music for 2 CD Players at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York using this method. After finishing the piece, Cage immediately came up to Tone and shook his hand. The technique is also used in his 1997 album, Solo for Wounded CD.

Always active in the United States with avant-garde music artists, he was awarded a CAPS Grant in multi-media, a 2004 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award, a New York State Council on the Arts commission grant for flutist Barbara Held, a National Endowment for the Arts grant for collaborative work with Blondell Cummings and Senga Nengdi, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in performance/emerging forms. Tone performed at the Kitchen, the Experimental Intermedia Foundation, P.S.1. Guggenheim Museum SoHo, and the Chicago Art Club among other notable venues. He has been included in several institutional group exhibitions at venues such as The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, The Yokohama Triennale 2001 in Yokohama, and the Moderni in the Casselo Museum in Turin. Music festivals which have featured Tone include All Tomorrow’s Parties in London, Sonic Light in Amsterdam, and Spectacle Vivante at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 1979 he was given the CAPS grant in multi-media and the Ars Electronica Golden Nica Prize in 2002. In 2023 his work was celebrated with a mini-retrospective at Artists Space in New York City that was curated by Danielle A. Jackson.

Selected discography

  • (1993) Yasunao Tone : Musica Iconologos (Lovely Music) CD
  • (1997) Yasunao Tone : Solo for Wounded CD (Tzadik) CD
  • (2001) Yasunao Tone : Wounded Man'Yo #38-9/2001 (Alku) 3" CD
  • (2003) Yasunao Tone : Yasunao Tone (Asphodel Records) CD
  • (2004) Yasunao Tone & Hecker: Palimpsest (Mego) CD
  • (2011) Yasunao Tone : MP3 Deviations #6+7 (Editions Mego) CD
  • (2011) Yasunao Tone : MP3 Deviations #8 (Editions Mego) LP
  • (2013) Yasunao Tone & Russell Haswell : Convulsive Threshold (Editions Mego) CD
  • (2017) Yasunao Tone : AI Deviation #1, #2 (Editions Mego) LP

Bibliography

  • Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language. Ed. Brandon LaBelle (Los Angeles/Copenhagen: Errant Bodies Press, 2007).
  • "Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art" by Brandon LaBelle (Continuum: New York, 2006), pp. 35–36, 39, 43, 45, 72, 153, 200, 218, 220-24, 241.
  • "The Fluxus Reader" ed. Ken Friedman (John Wiley and Sons: New York, 1998).
  • Caleb Stuart "Yasunao Tone's Wounded and Skipping Compact Discs: From Improvisation and Indeterminate Composition to Glitching CDs," Leonardo Electronic Almanac vol.10, no. 9, September 2002.

References

  • Yasunao Tone Biography
  • Yasunao Tone discography on Discogs.com
  • UBU Web Fluxus page with a MP3 of a piece by Yasunao Tone
  • Essay on Yasunao Tone
  • Radio Incarné. Yasunao Tone and Tetsuo Kogawa a collaboration for Ràdio Web MACBA