What is Onchi?
Onchi (音痴) is a Japanese word comprised of the characters for ’sound’ and ’stupid’.
Like its nearest English equivalent ‘tone deaf’, it usually indicates a person who either can’t sing or keep time, or else fails to appreciate music that the rest of society deems worthy of appreciation.
Here at Japan Onchi, we would like to humbly appropriate this term to describe the music we like; music that is often far from perceived notions of quality or ‘cool’.
Onchi is our umbrella and the creatures we usher under it during a critical monsoon are the fantastically shaped ones belonging to the underground, the avant-garde, the far side, the left of centre and whatever else people who think differently want to name as their field.
While ‘onchi’ is most likely to be used pejoratively in Japan to mean tone-deafness in a person’s musical tastes, singing or playing ability, applied to music itself it can stand for anything that is atonal, arrhythmical, unskilled or undanceable (according to the common criteria of elements considered necessary to stimulate dancing in people.)
These were exactly the criteria used to dismiss indigenous Japanese music by early European explorers. Judged by the narrow criteria of the Western classical tradition, native Japanese sounds were regarded as atonal, non-harmonic, vacuous and even excruciating by unsympathetic visitors. Attitudes have come around since then but even today the open-space lilt of the shamisen is still felt to be an acquired taste.
Owing to its long insulation from the polluting influences of the Western harmonic form and the social factors that allowed for a healthy underground and experimental music culture to flourish in the latter half of the twentieth century, Japan is a major hub of onchi music.
Paradigmatic onchi artists in Japan include the improvised avant-folk act Maher Shalal Hash Baz, the contrapuntal pop-punk outfit Ni-Hao!, the impish situationist mischief of Violent Onsen Geisha and the abrasive sonic experiments of Boredoms (pictured above). Not all the artists in the list on the right are strictly onchi, but most would probably be rejected outright by listeners with conventional tastes.
By no means are the principles of onchi restricted only to Japan. Non-Japanese artists with underlying onchi characteristics include: Reynolds, The Red Krayola, The Shaggs, The Residents, Daniel Johnston, The Raincoats, Pere Ubu, Lydia Lunch, Dupobs and many hundreds more.
