Adachi Tomomi Royal Chorus

This month students of Tama Art University in Tokyo are learning how to be a ‘punk chorus’. Regrettably, this doesn’t allow for gobbing into the orchestra pit, though there will be screaming in Tama, lots of it. Here they are performing the experimental choral piece Yumiko by Adachi Tomomi in a clip just recently posted online by the man himself.

Yumiko, which featured on the album Yo for Tzadik Records in 2003, is fairly representative of the oeuvre of a man who once jokingly titled his act the Adachi Tomomi Royal Chorus. Take a listen to Anata 5, which takes one sample of melodramatic recorded speech and gradually transforms it into another:

Adachi Tomomi - Anata 5

A graduate of philosophy and aesthetics from Waseda University, Adachi is Japan’s only performing sound poet, as well as its most renowned inventor of crazy sound machines. What’s that you say? You need some electronic clothing that gives out piercing feedback shrieks every time you move your body?! Is Adachi ever your man! Details of these experimental devices plus geneous helpings of movie and sound files are available from his website or from Ubu.com.

Meanwhile, those lucky enough to have been in a particular park in Germany one day in July last year will already have had the chance to be alarmed by this Japanese fellow and his ‘wearable electronic music’. This may not be the most promising opening shot of a movie you’ll ever see but it does get fascinating at around 0:35. At the end we get to ‘hear’ Adachi packing his music into a backpack before running off and leaving a group of confused Germans to figure out what the hell they have just witnessed: