The art of Yasunao Tone

Yasunao Tone was a Japanese artist who spent seven decades turning tools against themselves. A literature graduate turned Fluxus insurgent, he co-founded Group Ongaku in 1961 to treat teacups and tape recorders as instruments. Later in his life in New York, he ironed shirts on electric guitars and taught CDs to stutter. His “paramedia” philosophy, which the media was forced to misbehave, made him the accidental godfather of glitch. Nowhere is this clearer than in Solo for Wounded CD (1997, Tzadik), where he scratched compact discs with tape and let error correction algorithms compose music itself. Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEDi-39o5qw The track begins in a strange frequency. It starts off with the sound of a laser hitting a gouge, the player’s panic rendered audible. From there, fragments of forgotten melodies surface like ghosts through fog. There were distant chords, a warped vocal sigh, all stretched and splintered. The disc skips, but never predictably. Each jump ...