Asia’s music – like its politics – remains full of barriers, with historical tensions casting a long shadow. But a group of Asian artists has discovered harmony in, of all places, noise.
Calling themselves the Far East Network, the quartet loosely revolves around Otomo Yoshihide, a leading force in Japan’s onkyo-kei scene of experimental noise that emerged in Tokyo in the late 1990s.
The ensemble has been performing together periodically since 2008 but has come to New York to record for the first time, hoping to produce an album.
The only way is improvisation, because we all play in different ways
In a studio resembling a tree-house in Brooklyn’s waterfront Red Hook neighbourhood, Otomo meticulously manipulated his guitar’s sound, sticking in alligator clips from a hardware store and licking his finger and rubbing it on the instrument’s body, producing a gentle squeaking sound with the aid of his pedals.
Next to him, Singaporean avant-garde musician Yuen Chee Wai pressed a hard brush against the strings of his own guitar on his lap.
Ryu Hankil, a South Korean artist with no formal musical training, took to his laptop while Yan Jun of China, whose background is in poetry and multimedia, manned the mixing board.
In a jam session akin to free jazz, the Far East Network set off with no script, producing noises that are at times robotic or caustic, frequently jarring, and rarely have traditional rhythmic structure.