Review - Yasunao Tone

No laptop-packing error-smiths can brag of programming a Univac unless by emulating cold-war tech in Linux, but Yasunao Tone marked the vac on his résumé in the 1960s. A Japanese Fluxus artist, Tone's junket into breaking cerebral restraints in contemporary composition has kept him beneath the radar, though compared to Cage, Stockhausen and others. The reason? Tone's music isn't boring: It's packed with soul. Penning Tang Dynasty poems into waveforms could be the recipe for another conceptual experiment that might be good for the intellect, but does little for the imagination. Yasunao cultivates these ancient Chinese words into brackets of fragged noise that could give skronk-maestros like Thurston Moore nightmares. Tone fuses concept and kick-ass noise, and it moves with the energy of a sincere love instead of another dull experiment to expand the vocabulary of music's tonalities or simply make a statement.