plourde - disciplined listening in tokyo: onkyo and non-intentional sounds

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Disciplined Listening in Tokyo: Onkyō and Non-Intentional Sounds Author(s): Lorraine Plourde Reviewed work(s): Source: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Spring/Summer, 2008), pp. 270-295 Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20174589 . Accessed: 17/05/2012 13:22 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Illinois Press and Society for Ethnomusicology are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethnomusicology. http://www.jstor.org

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Page 1: Plourde - Disciplined Listening in Tokyo: Onkyo and Non-Intentional Sounds

Disciplined Listening in Tokyo: Onkyō and Non-Intentional SoundsAuthor(s): Lorraine PlourdeReviewed work(s):Source: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Spring/Summer, 2008), pp. 270-295Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for EthnomusicologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20174589 .Accessed: 17/05/2012 13:22

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

University of Illinois Press and Society for Ethnomusicology are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Ethnomusicology.

http://www.jstor.org

Page 2: Plourde - Disciplined Listening in Tokyo: Onkyo and Non-Intentional Sounds

Vol. 52, No. 2 Ethnomusicology Spring/Summer 2008

Disciplined Listening in Tokyo: Onky? and Non-Intentional Sounds

Lorraine Plourde / Columbia University

Music is not determined by its performers; what sounds are deemed as music

or not is left up to the listener.

?Otomo Yoshihide (2004)

When you are present at an Off Site concert, this intense listening is highly noticeable. The music is, let's face it, hardly a picnic for the audience. Sitting on small stools on a concrete floor, they listen like they mean it. This is

listening that you can almost see, suspended in the room like colored light. -?Clive Bell (2003:42)

Introduction

During

the mid to late 1990s, the international avant-garde electronic music world was distinguished by a variety of new approaches to

sound performance, many of which were influenced by techniques of mini

malism, free improvisation, and the rise in popularity of sound art. This moment is seen by some scholars as indicative of an "auditory turn in con

temporary culture" (Cox and Warner 2004: xiii), a period in which questions of listening and hearing were foregrounded by media theorists, historians, and anthropologists, as well as musicians. In Japan one such genre that

emerged during this time is referred to as onky? (sound)?an extremely minimal, improvisatory musical style and performance approach that pays particular attention to sound texture, gaps, and silences. One of onky?'s most distinctive characteristics is its seemingly utter lack of any discern ible musical structure?rhythmic, harmonic, or otherwise?which is often

performed at barely audible levels. Because of onky?'s minimal sonic pres ence, the role of the listener came to occupy the site of various discourses and debates in Tokyo, including modes of listening, or ch?shu (audition), as well as the presence and/or necessity of background or extramusical

? 2008 by the Society for Ethnomusicology

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sounds. The genre itself is inextricably linked with the now defunct Tokyo performance space and gallery Off Site, which was opened in late June 2000

by musician and artist Ito Atsuhiro and his wife Ito Yukari,1 who curated the gallery exhibitions.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tokyo from 2004 to

2007 and participant observation and regular attendance at Off Site during its final year of operation, from 2004 to 2005, this article will convey the sensorial and social experience of listening at Off Site through ethnographic description and analysis. I will also unravel the disjuncture between the musicians' attempts to create a free (j'iy? na) and seemingly uncontrolled

listening environment, and the audience's concrete experience of awkward tension and overly strict rules of spectatorship. As I argue, the discipline re

quired of the listener in order to properly comprehend onky? is dependent on the recognition and usage of specific listening strategies. Such strategies are a learned bodily technique highly contingent on public knowledge and

discourse, which, in turn, facilitate "proper" understanding and appreciation of onky?. Listeners in this community are dependent on the constant pro duction and circulation of such knowledge?in the form of public talks and

performances, pamphlets and handouts at concerts, special issue journals and

magazines, musicians'blogs and everyday conversation?in order to achieve

so-called proper listening and comprehension. By highlighting the listener and their physical and intellectual relationship to sound, this article seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature on practices of listening and their relationship to the urban soundscape.An ethnographic approach to

understanding localized?as well as "underground"?aesthetic forms will nevertheless reveal themes and issues that speak more broadly to the navi

gation and experience of everyday life in contemporary Tokyo and its urban

soundscape. As Georgina Born notes in her discussion of the crucial role of ethnographic analyses of Western institutions?in her case, the French

computer music and research institute, IRCAM?"it takes a method such as ethnography to uncover the gaps between external claims and internal

realities, public rhetoric and private thought, ideology and practice" (Born 1995:7). While the historical trajectory and practices of the Euro-American

musical avant-garde are well established (Born 1995; Kahn and Whitehead

1992; Kahn 1999; Nyman [1974] 1999) there has been little ethnographic research conducted on non-Western contemporary avant-garde music com

munities, particularly in the domain of listening. This article will also consider the spatial and material conditions of onky?'s origins, in this case the cramped, urban landscape of Tokyo. As a form that could have only emerged from an urban environment, how might the soundscape of Tokyo imprint itself on the musical style known as onky??

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272 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2008

Modernity and Aural Culture

In recent years, various academic disciplines, including history, anthro

pology, and ethnomusicology, have witnessed a resurgence of interest in

questions of auditory perception and listening as a critical and often over looked dimension of modernity, which is often characterized by a regime of

visuality, or ocularcentrism (Bull and Back 2003; Erlmann 2004; Sterne 2003).

Modernity can also be defined as a change in bodily experience, due to radi cal disruptions in the sensory experience of the everyday (Benjamin 1968; Gunning 1995;Schivelbusch 1977). New technological developments in the

nineteenth-century such as the railway and cinema, generated ever-increasing

assaults on the body, both psychological and physiological. Central to this

change in sensory experience was the shock of new sounds, particularly those generated by urban machinery. Following the processes of urbanization and industrialization, the modern soundscape of everyday life was radically reconfigured. Other recent works raise similar arguments, including the role of architecture in creating urban soundscapes in early twentieth century America (Thompson 2002), and a cultural history of listening which focuses on the shifting role of classical music listeners in nineteenth-century Paris

(Johnson 1994). This article builds upon this recent scholarship on listening, yet extends

the analysis to focus specifically on the auditory experiments of the con

temporary avant-garde in Tokyo. This is crucial, for it was the avant-garde,

the Italian Futurists in particular, who seized these new sounds, noises, and

sensations of the early twentieth century modern soundscape?especially those generated by industrial machinery and the sounds of warfare?and

adopted them as explicitly modern musical aesthetics. In his infamous 1913

manifesto,"The Art of Noises," Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo (1986) implored readers to "cross a large modern capital with our ears more attentive than our

eyes."2 This manifesto, in fact, is generally seen as the first explicit attempt to

engage with the concept of noise as music. Consequently, Russolo is often

positioned as the forefather of not only contemporary Noise music, but also a critical historical figure within the genealogy of postwar avant-garde music such as musique concr?te.

In order to make these linkages between the early twentieth-century Euro-American avant-garde with the contemporary avant-garde in Tokyo, the

notion of coeval modernity is crucial. Historian Harry Harootunian argues that the Japanese experience of modernity must be understood as coeval, or co-existing with global modernity Rejecting the categorization of moder

nity in Japan as an "alternative modernity," Harootunian notes that coeval

modernity highlights "the experience of sharing the same temporality," how ever he follows this with the critical statement that,"what co-eval suggests is

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contemporaneity yet the possibility of difference" (Harootunian 2000:xvii). This approach is crucial in order to avoid cultural essentializing moves such as the interpretation "that things that are not obviously modern or Western are rooted in Japan's cultural or historical deep structure" (Inoue 2006:5). For example, foreign media coverage of Off Site has a tendency to elide the material conditions of Tokyo housing, architecture, and the everyday urban

soundscape at the expense of linking onky? with "a Japanese tradition of stillness stretching back to the medieval Noh theatre" (Bell 2003:44), a link

age many of my informants vehemently denied. While acknowledging that

onky? performed in Japan was embedded within a larger, global network of musicians in the United States and Europe in the late 1990s with shared

aesthetics, this article however, examines the development of onky? within

Tokyo and focuses on the local inflections of the genre's performance and

reception. Despite the frequent musical collaborations with international

musicians, the local discourses surrounding the Off Site community, and the

avant-garde music community overall, were, not surprisingly, largely in Japa nese. Here, such discourse refers to regularly occurring music-themed public talk events, as well as concert handouts, free papers, journals, magazines, and

musicians' and critics' blogs, all of which continues to be regularly produced, circulated and avidly consumed by Tokyo's listening public.

Onky? as Term, Genre and Performance Style

Onky? has been explained by musicians and music critics in Japan as a

style in which the primary emphasis has shifted from producing or performing sound, to that of concentrated and attentive listening (mimi wo sumasu) (Sa saki 2001:221). The term onky? is linked to the field of acoustics (pnky?gak?) thus highlighting the centrality of tonal color (timbre) and reverberation and its physiological effects on the listener as a crucial component of the genre. The word onky? is composed of two characters; the first, on (read as oto in

Japanese), meaning sound, and the second, ky? (read as hibiki in Japanese), indicating reverberation or echo. It should be noted that onky? is not used as an everyday term for sound in Japan; instead the term oto is most commonly used. The word onky? is probably most known for its linkages with the high end Japanese audio equipment manufacturer by the same name.

Because the question of listening and the consciousness and percep tion of the individual listener are so central to the genre itself, the acoustic dimensions of the character compound are worth lingering over. As a genre that emphasizes the listener's conscious recognition of the reverberation of sound (pto no hibiki), onky? has thus been described by its musicians as a genre specifically for the listener. The listener's auditory perception was nevertheless challenged by onky?'s subtle and often faint presence, which

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was further complicated by non-intentional sounds occurring within the

performance space or filtering in from outside. A reviewer of a 2004 onky? recording writes:"It is absolutely impossible to judge whether the individual listener's perception of the seemingly imperceptible shifts [bisai na henka] is based on the listener's own consciousness or an actual physical occur

rence"(Unami 2005:217). Onky?'s emphasis on the listener has subsequently prompted numerous local debates within Tokyo's experimental music scene

concerning proper modes of listening, physical conditions of performance space, and the nature of sound/music itself. Taking into consideration what

John Cage referred to as non-intentional sounds (non-musical sounds?such as

traffic or a door opening?that accidentally occur within the live performance space), onky? directly confronts the larger question of what constitutes music itself.3 The acceptance of such non-intentional sounds by the performers and listeners is seen as one of the hallmarks of onky?'s live performance environ

ment, yet such openness on the part of the performers contrasts with the tense atmosphere within which onky? is performed and heard. As an impro visatory genre putatively for the listener and their individual interpretation, onky? nevertheless unwittingly enforces certain modes of both listening and

spectatorship in its live performance context. The history of the genre of onky? has several versions. It is often said

that the term was first used by an employee of the Tokyo-based record store,

Paris-Peking Records, in the mid-1990s (Otomo 2001:62). Onky? was later

adopted as a descriptive term in the late 1990s by one of its main propo nents and performers, Otomo Yoshihide, to refer to a specifically Tokyo-based improvisatory musical style, which foregrounded the role of the listener and their perception and interpretation of the sounds generated by this music. This particular coterie of Tokyo-based musicians came to be cited as

onky?-ha, the suffix of which designates them as a specific musical school, bound together by stylistic affinity. When Off Site opened in 2000, a small

group of Tokyo-based musicians converged around the performance space and began to hold weekly or monthly improvisatory music series, often led

by Otomo Yoshihide. These musicians eventually came to be inextricably connected with Off Site, to the extent that their style, in addition to the label

onky?-ha, became interchangeably known as Off Site-kei, thereby linking the style known as onky? with the geographical location of the space. The suffix -kei denotes a stylistic, and in this case, geographic and spatial affinity, and is often used in the popular music world. For example, the mid-1990s

popular electronic music genre exemplified by such bands as Cornelius and Pizzicato 5 emerged in the Shibuya district of Tokyo and came to be referred in the media as Shibuya-kei.

Most musicians who were included in the category of onky? by the media were quick to reject any connection whatsoever to this genre and its

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presumed sense of community. Otomo himself later came to regret his coin

ing of the moniker, as the term was eventually picked up by the media and circulated regularly throughout the experimental music world in Japan as well as the U.S. and Europe. That musicians would actively reject such categoriza tion of their music into a fixed genre and/or community is not particular to the avant-garde. Ingrid Monson's ethnomusicological study of jazz musicians in New York City revealed that many of them prefer the term music, or "the

music called jazz" as a rejoinder to the implicit association of the term music with Western classical music, an association which relegates jazz to a lower status (Monson 1996:101). In the case of Tokyo's experimental music com

munity, however, the musicians' rejection of the term onky?-ha confronts a different set of issues. The artistic output by avant-garde musicians labeled as onky?-ha necessarily defies categorization and immediate comprehension; therefore, such facile pigeonholing goes against the knowledge, discipline, and concentration that this music demands of its listeners. In addition, many musicians and Tokyo-based music critics critique the use of the word onky? as an ultimately meaningless term. For example, music critic Sasaki Atsushi notes the fundamental strangeness (kimyo) of the term onky?-ha, arguing that the suffix -ha denotes a coherent, bounded community of members

sharing common aesthetics, yet, in reality, most so-called onky?-ha musicians

persistently denied membership in such a community (Sasaki 2001:165). He further detects a tautology within the term itself, arguing that music (i.e., sound) always already indicates the reverberation (hibikt) of sound, there fore to term a music genre in this way is repetitive and tautological. Many of these so-called onky?-ha musicians preferred instead the putatively neutral term, sokky? ongaku (improvised music), though over the last few years in

Tokyo, the term improvised has itself come under scrutiny. The notion of

improvised music has been explicitly rejected by some musicians, who view the aforementioned onky? community as a sect that many choose to avoid.

Musical performances at Off Site often occurred as part of weekly or

monthly regular series, such as the "Meeting at Off Site" series, the live re

cordings of which were later released by the Improvised Music from Japan label. This label began in 2001 as a counterpart to the website by the same name created in 1996 by Suzuki Yoshiyuki. This website provides up-to-date information, including tour schedules, profiles and discographies of Japanese

musicians, onky? and otherwise. In fact, the website and its accompanying yearly magazine was a critical source of media for listeners to gather infor mation such as interviews with onky? musicians. Performances at Off Site often ranged from varying permutations of a small group of Japanese musi cians occasionally supplemented by touring musicians from Europe or the United States. Most live performances were composed of two sets, generally lasting twenty-five to forty minutes each, interspersed by an intermission

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between the sets that usually lasted fifteen minutes. Instruments used at Off Site ranged from acoustic, such as guitar, trombone or saxophone, to

electronic, including the sampler and turntable. What is notable here is the

particular instrumental techniques that were employed, which often involved

using modified, or extended techniques, such as circular breathing or using foreign objects as additional implements. Guitars were often performed as

prepared guitar, in which the instrument was laid flat on a small table in order to coax a wide breadth of sounds from the instrument. When performing on

prepared turntable, objects such as clips or bent-up cards, were often attached to the needle as well as placed directly on the empty turntable as it spun. Such techniques often produced intermittent static, hums and glitches that occurred with each revolution of the turntable. Cyclically recurring rhythms, however, would rarely develop or unfold during performances at Off Site. One of Off Site's regular performers, Sachiko M, performed using a sampler. However, instead of drawing on and manipulating stored samples, the sam

pler was empty; her palette instead drew from the test tone sine waves that are built into the machine. Although most sets at Off Site were improvised, compositions, often using graphic scores, were also performed at Off Site. In the case of improvised group sessions, many musicians did not react or

respond to one another during the performance. Duration was often the

only factor agreed upon prior to the performance. Instead of relying on eye contact in order to end a set, many musicians at Off Site, especially during composition sessions, employed stopwatches set to a pre-determined and

synchronized period of time.

Noise, Onky?, and Stoicism

Japan is most frequently invoked as the primary inspiration and source of the contemporary genre of Noise music (noizu myujikku), a genre in which sound is produced through the extreme distortion, manipulation, and often deliberate misuse of technology, including guitar pedals, microphones and, more recently, laptop computers. The first-generation of Noise practi tioners in Japan, such as Merzbow and Hijokaidan, began creating noise in the late 1970s. Noise became consolidated as a genre during the 1980s, a

period when avant-garde music and art in general flourished amidst Japan's thriving bubble economy. During the 1990s, Japanese experimental music

more generally, including Noise music, was circulated and consumed on a

transnational level throughout the US and Europe (Novak 2006).

Although Noise music, in which inflicting aural pain on the listener is a

crucial component, appears to be completely antithetical to the extremely quiet sounds generated by onky?, some Tokyo-based critics and musicians have argued that the sheer masochism and excessive nature of Noise music

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draws on a similar extreme aesthetic of stoicism. In contemporary Japan, the term "stoic" (sutoikku) is frequently used as an everyday term to indi

cate a sense of asceticism and its usage is heard within the experimental music world as well, often in reference to Noise musicians. For example, Akita Masami, whose project is known as Merzbow, and Haino Keiji, are two

longstanding musicians who are frequently described as stoic within Tokyo's

experimental music scene.4 It is believed that both genres, Noise music and

onky?, reflect opposite polarities of this aesthetic extremism. In Noise music

the listener is assaulted by excessive volume, while in onky?, which draws on often barely audible sounds and the silences between them, the listener is assaulted by the virtual absence of sound.

Although listening to onky? is not physically painful as in the case of

listening to Noise music, the sheer brutality and subtlety within which such

extremely minute sonic development occurs necessarily places particular and strict demands on the listener?such as straining one's ears. The discipliniza tion of the listeners' bodies and ears is further revealed by the strategies many listeners utilize in order to adapt to onky?'s rigid listening environment. In

addition, the space of Off Site itself, as I will show, creates an atmosphere that some listeners and musicians have experienced as full of tension. The

specific conditions of onky?'s listening environment are a critical factor to the

process which I refer to as "disciplined listening," a mode determined in part by the architectural space?including Tokyo's soundscape?in which onky? is performed and heard, as well as the social dynamics of the performance space. Here, the listener is expected to attend performances already possess ing the knowledge and manner of onky? and the proper mode of listening to this music. Possession of such knowledge and implicit rules of listening

necessarily creates certain exclusionary boundaries within the listening public, adding further to the demands that regulate this particular social experience of listening.

Listening at Off Site: Ethnographic Reflections

Immediately upon entering Off Site, audience members encounter the

owner, Ito Atsuhiro, seated at the back of the stark, ground-level performance space, selling tickets. As is customary in Tokyo, one drink, often beer, wine, soda, or oolong tea, must be purchased, along with the ticket. Drinks are

served on the second floor by Ito Yukari, Ito's wife and Off Site's co-owner. Tickets are typically 1,000-1,500 yen, considerably cheaper than tickets for live-house performances in Tokyo, which can run upwards of 3,000 yen.5 Inside the performance space, the audience sits on narrow aluminum-backed

folding chairs that force one to perch uncomfortably close to one's neigh bors, evoking a form of bodily tension akin to a subway commute during

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rush-hour in Tokyo. This tension (kinch?kan) refers to the disciplinization of the body?for both music spectator and rush-hour subway commuter?and its attendant social mores, including maintaining a sense of decorum (i.e., silence) as well as certain bodily cues or gestures, such as limiting eye contact

with others and avoiding unnecessary collisions with other bodies despite confined, narrow physical spaces. This tension is inherent to onky?'s tense

performance environment at Off Site, in which listeners must strain their ears (mimi wo sumasu) in order to grasp traces of onky?'s barely audible

presence.

Those already familiar with Off Site's specific ambience and exceedingly cramped conditions often arrive early and claim seats in the first row. At most

avant-garde performance spaces in Tokyo both performers and listeners are

seated throughout the performance, thus imposing a sense of order on the

spatial dimensions of the live space. In addition, this arrangement perhaps imparts the listeners' demeanor with an air of detachment or aloofness.6 Seats at Off Site are arranged in neat rows of four to five seats per row, and are

separated by a narrow, barely passable, aisle. Maximum capacity is between

thirty and thirty five, though it is not uncommon for a performance to draw fewer than ten listeners. Because there is no stage and the seated musicians

perform on the same level as the audience, sitting in the back often means

limited visibility. Listeners wait in somewhat eerie silence, mostly limiting conversations to soft, hushed tones. Most sit rigidly in their chairs, often times with their hands folded in their laps, quietly waiting for the performance to

begin. After lounging on the second floor the musician(s) enter the perfor mance space, often ten minutes or so after the official start time, which is

usually 8:00 p.m. A hush falls over the room and an almost palpable tension, which has been slowly accumulating over the waiting period, now becomes

visibly apparent. As is customary at experimental music performances in To

kyo, several audience members have set up personal recording equipment, such as MD or DAT recorders, which are placed discreetly on the floor. Aware that the musician(s) will invariably generate a negligible amount of noise

by shifting around equipment or setting up just prior to the performance, many listeners take advantage of this welcome rustling, however minute, to

pointedly clear their throats or take a final gulp of their drink before gently placing it on the floor underneath the seat in front of them. They do this because once the performance begins, the listeners must follow unwritten codes of etiquette, including maintaining silence and concentrating closely on

the music while avoiding any outward reactions. The tension is particularly heightened at Off Site because, unlike most music or theatre performances, the boundaries that mark the beginning of a performance at Off Site are not as readily apparent?the listeners cannot simply sit back and relax. There is a thick atmosphere of uncertainty and perhaps unrest, as the audience's

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silence is intensified by its confrontation with a performance that is marked

by minutiae, sparsity, and long spatial gaps. Musicians at Off Site typically begin their performance without address

ing or even acknowledging the audience's immediate physical presence, instead giving a simple nod of the head to the owner, should they request the lights be dimmed. The spectator is immediately struck by the seemingly inactive musicians, both physically and sonically, to the extent that the lis tener wonders whether in fact, the performance has actually started or not. This ambiguity, which serves as one of the many layers of tension present in the live performance space, is further accentuated by the fact that there are often very few movements or visual cues of any sort by the musicians. In contrast to the notion of live musical performance as visual spectacle?Pete Townshend's guitar windmills would be the antithesis of onky??there is sometimes so little movement at Off Site performances that listeners often look anywhere but at the musicians.7 Many listeners even close their eyes during the performance making it unclear as to whether they are listening intently or simply asleep.

Off Site as Experimental Performance Space and Gallery

According to its founder, Ito Atsuhiro, Off Site was to be an alternative to Tokyo's rental gallery system, which has been the predominant system of art exhibition and music performance in Japan. In Tokyo's music world, most live music, whether rock, pop, punk, etc., operates according to a quota-based

(noruma) rental space system, in which the performers must quite literally, "pay to play." Musicians must rent the performance space, called live houses,

and operate on the premise of a guarantee. If the audience does not reach a

predetermined amount, then the musicians must pay the live space owners for any potentially lost seats. Off Site's oppositional stance towards Japan's primary economic system undergirding live music and art exhibitions is reflected in the naming of the space, which is, as Ito Yukari explains, a cross between offside (hansoku) and site (Jichi), and conveys Off Site's distinct and deliberate intermingling of art exhibitions and live music performances (Ito 2002:88).

Conceiving of Off Site as an experimental space (jikken kaij?) through which performers could reassess and reconfigure the performance and lis

tening environment, Ito primarily selected musicians from his own group of

acquaintances. The result of this was that Off Site had the feel of a tight-knit community, yet could also give the air of an exclusive group of insiders that was difficult for outsiders to enter casually. Located near the east exit of To

kyo's Yoyogi subway station and within striking visual distance of the impos ing NTT Docomo tower, Off Site was situated in a small residential alley filled

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with detached wooden houses. Some of the more common types of housing structures in Tokyo are ap?to (apartment), referring to older style wooden

apartments that provide very little sound or heat insulation, and manshon

(mansion), which simply denotes an apartment building reinforced by a steel or concrete structure and retains none of the lavish connotations of the

English term. Off Site itself occupied a small two-floor wooden house,with similar noise restrictions to that of apartment buildings (ap?to), in which

sound easily penetrates the adjoining houses and apartments. One of the most striking characteristics of Off Site thus lies in its particular spatial and architectural conditions. Although it was located in a detached house, Off Site nevertheless placed certain demands on the musicians and listeners, in

order not to disturb the neighbors who lived in very close proximity. All of the live performances had to be at an extraordinarily low volume, so low in

fact, that outside sounds such as traffic, pedestrians' footsteps or traces of

conversations, would inevitably filter in and often overpower or commingle with the sounds of the performance itself.

The music performance and art exhibition space occupied Off Site's

extremely spartan first floor with its bare concrete floors, blank white walls and neat rows of small stools. In conceptualizing Off Site's spatial layout, Ito chose to retain the original design of the building's previous owners who used

the first floor as an office and the second floor as a living space. Ito wanted the first floor gallery and performance space to be as neutral and modest as possible, while retaining the lived-in quality of the previous owners' oc

cupancy on the second floor. A narrow staircase led up to the second floor which featured a small bar, CD and book shop, couch, and several chairs and small tables. Following performances, many audience members would head

upstairs to gather and mingle with the musicians or browse the book and CD collections, often featuring recordings by regular performers at Off Site. This casual bar or caf? atmosphere of the second floor was seen by some

musicians as a salon or haunt (tamariba), wherein the informalness of the

space itself gave impetus to aesthetic exchanges between a close-knit group of musicians and friends. Ito ultimately envisioned the second floor space as a

refuge for both the musicians and listeners to linger following performances, in contrast to most gallery spaces in which the spectators leave immediately after viewing the artworks on display.

Ito is quick to point out the contingent factors between Off Site's devel

opment and onky?'s emergence as a definable genre. He notes that it wasn't a

situation where certain musicians gathered together and consciously decided to create a form of music using only small, minimal sounds. Ito, in fact, largely credits Off Site's neighbor's constant noise complaints for indirectly creating this new form of music. Music performed at Off Site was often half-jokingly called by some as oyaji (old man music), referring to?in a slightly deroga

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tory manner?the person living adjacently who made these complaints, in

addition to voicing opinions about the physical presence of audience mem

bers loitering and smoking outside the performance space. As previously mentioned, Off Site's extreme sound restrictions required that musicians

comply with such performance rules. According to those involved, however, these restrictions were not felt as limiting at all, and in fact offered the musi

cians a surprising sense of freedom not possible in a typical performance space. As Off Site's owner, Ito Atsuhiro, explained: "Musical instruments can

always produce a large amount of volume but they can also produce small sounds. So, what happened at Off Site was experimenting with what kinds of possibilities could be found within these small sounds" (p.c., Ito Atsuhiro, 17 November 2004,Tokyo).8

Listening to Tokyo's Soundscape: Outside Sounds

Much of the criticism of onky? circulated withinTokyo describes the pro cess of listening to onky? as mimi wo sumasu (straining one's ears). Indeed, this compulsion to strain one's ears is crucial to Off Site's overall aesthetic and is a phrase commonly affixed to descriptions of Off Site within Japanese media. This phrase in Japanese can also be used to indicate that one is listen

ing attentively, a connotation that suggests the aural discipline required on the part of the listeners. Yet despite this physical and aural stillness within the confines of onky?'s live performance, the listener is inevitably confronted

by the intrusion of the aforementioned sounds of everyday urban life as well as sounds from the audience seeping into the performance space. Despite its status as a performance space with extreme sound restrictions, outside

sounds and their co-existence with the musical performances came to be seen

as one of Off Site's distinctive and inimitable listening conditions. Accord

ing to Off Site's owner, these sounds were integral to the live environment

serving as accidental events that are inevitable and impossible to control or

regulate. Referring to them as hapuningu (happenings), Ito described their

relationship to the music performances at Off Site: "Sounds that penetrate the performance space, such as people passing by, ambulance sirens, fire

trucks, etc., these sorts of happenings [hapuningu] are inevitable; such as a drunk person walking by, or someone walking by loudly; actually, the loudest

(and most common) sound is people kicking cans. But it's fine, I think, these kinds of sounds are good" (p.c., Ito Atsuhiro, 25 May 2005,Tokyo). The term

hapuningu is an everyday term in Japanese which indicates an accidental or unexpected event.

The notion of non-intentional or outside sound happenings was a topic that regularly emerged within Tokyo's experimental music community, via such domains as print media, everyday conversations, as well as musicians'

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blogs. Some musicians and listeners I interviewed, many of whom are directly involved in the onky? music community, expressed openness to the penetra tion of outside sounds into the performance environment, but with certain limitations. For them the notion of outside sounds was a more restricted?

though ultimately subjective?category that did not extend to include sounds

originating from the bodies of audience members, such as those who drew attention to themselves by breathing heavily or accidentally dropping a beer bottle. Both listeners and musicians at Off Site drew distinctions between

acceptable and unacceptable sounds. One listener, who regularly attended

performances at Off Site, admitted he had a particular taste for music that was influenced by environmental and/or ambient sounds but clearly added that the very category of outside sounds had limits. He went on to compare Off Site, describing it as a space where "pleasant city noises entered the

performance space," to Art Land, another avant-garde performance space in

Tokyo that featured non-intentional sounds of a radically different nature.

Situated below a Japanese style bar, the sounds of old men singing karaoke

constantly filter in and ruin the experience. The issue according to this lis tener is not that the sounds themselves are inherently uninteresting sounds, but the fact that they completely wash over and obscure the sounds of the

performance.

Ito Atsuhiro, on the other hand, was more amenable to outside sounds that emanated from the listeners, referring to these often unpredictable and uncontrollable reactions during onky?'s live performances as human hap

penings (ningen no hapuningu). These human happenings, according to

Ito, are crucial to the live context, and by extension, to improvisation itself.

For him, the ephemerality of the live improvisatory context was central to Off Site's atmosphere, as such occurrences could never be repeated or occur

again. He also recalled how during the early days of Off Site, when audience members were perhaps less disciplined, listeners would often fall asleep dur

ing a performance, and at the sound of applause, jolt themselves awake and

literally fall out of their seats, causing a minor commotion and even laughter. These random acts were all a part of the show.

This idea of happenings to designate intermittent sounds?outside, human, or other?has its origins in the Fluxus group. Fluxus happenings originated in the U.S. during the early 1960s and became an international

movement, with participation by European and Japanese artists in particular, including Yoko Ono and the composer and student of John Cage, Ichiyanagi Toshi.9 By its very nature, Fluxus as a multimedia art movement necessarily defied simplistic definition; one of its essential characteristics, however, was an emphasis on reconfiguring the relationship between performer and audience?a relationship similarly disrupted and reconfigured in the genre of onky?. As Ito explained to me, onky? allowed the performer and audience

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to be situated on the same level: "Previously, in live music performance, it was unidirectional, moving from performer to audience; the performer was

the presenter \happyo suru gawa]. However, in the case of onky?, both

performers and audience are equally receptive to the sound and both listen

[mimi wo motsuY (p.c., Ito Atsuhiro, 17 November 2004,Tokyo). While this statement might serve to represent the ideal?that both per

former and listener theoretically co-exist on the same level in onky?'s per formances?the human happenings, or accidental events on the part of the

listeners, often served to dismantle this perceived equality between musician and listener. In contrast to live houses where musicians and audience members are explicitly separated by a performance stage, the performers and listeners at Off Site are physically close to one another with no demarcation, seemingly experiencing a sense of shared space and time.Yet listeners are expected to sit and listen quietly throughout the performance while refraining from emit

ting outside sounds of their own. These sounds that stem from the listening public, were in fact more often than not met with disdain by musicians and reveal the limits of tolerance regarding such sounds. More acceptable forms of outside sounds, however, were viewed quite favorably by musicians and had a dramatic impact on both musicians and listeners at Off Site, to the extent that

many claimed that their hearing had dramatically changed over the course of its five year existence. Soon after Off Site's closing in 2005, Otomo Yoshihide noted on his personal blog:"If it was five years ago, I would never have heard the subtle sounds which I'm now constantly aware of" (Otomo 2005). A regular listener at Off Site similarly noted how his hearing has radically shifted since

attending performances at Off Site, and he is now able to hear much more delicate sounds (sensai no oto). He explained: "Before, I didn't appreciate sounds that had no connection to music, such as a clock ticking. At the very least, I didn't understand the condition of these sounds. But perhaps now, I still hate violent sounds, such as people's voices, especially patronizing or

nagging tones, as well as the announcer's voice inside the subway. Aside from these sounds, I'm not bothered by any other sounds now" (p.c., 23 October

2005,Tokyo). This notion that onky? itself is believed to have generated new modes

of hearing and listening is further linked to the notion of place?in this case,

Tokyo?and more specifically Off Site. Here,Tokyo's soundscape cannot be

disengaged from music performances, and for many musicians these outside sounds have become an integral part of the performance. Furthermore, these conditions are often cited by participants in this community as Tokyo teki

jijy? (Tokyo-esque). With its attention to silence, stillness, and gaps, onky? is often explained in foreign media coverage as a quintessentially Japanese aesthetic, particularly in its putative adherence to Zen. Most of my informants in Tokyo however, strongly rejected this notion, arguing instead that onky?

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was determined in part by Tokyo's specific housing conditions in which residents typically live in cramped apartments largely uninsulated from their

neighbors. This functionalist, rather than aesthetic, explanation is mirrored in

Marilyn Ivy's ethnography in which she discusses small-scale variety theater

(taish? engeki) in Japan features extremely loud musical interludes. When

questioned as to the reason for such high volume, the primarily middle-aged and elderly audience members explained that it is necessary simply because the audience is generally hard of hearing (Ivy 1995:225).

In his analysis of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, Peter Burger emphasizes the point that its members did not distance and isolate themselves from society as is often claimed, but rather, vehemently and aggressively strove "to reintegrate themselves and their art into life" (Burger 1984:xxxvi). In the case of onky?, given that musicians, listeners, and critics unanimously cite the

importance of these outside sounds at Off Site, there is perhaps an implicit call for the r?int?gration of art with daily life. The musicians' acceptance of non-intentional sounds has a limit, however, which does not necessarily extend to the listening public. In fact, one musician admitted to me that the ideal performance situation at Off Site was achieved when the room was

completely empty, i.e., without listeners present?art for art's sake, or the

complete dissolution of art as life or life as art. This musician somewhat wist

fully noted that the best acoustics occurred during the sound check, a period of time when only the performer and owner were present in the space:"Off Site sounds the best when absolutely no one else is in the room. During the rehearsal time, when no audience members are there, is the best time. Once

people start to arrive ... there's the (loud) sounds of people breathing, which lessens the sounds of the performance

.. .When no one is in the room, the

echo and reverberation is great" (p.c., 15 July 2005,Tokyo).

Disciplined Listening: Not Moving a Muscle

(mijirogi shinai) While sitting on thin floor cushions, the audience enjoyed the performance amidst an atmosphere of tension.

?Hosoma Hiromichi (2005:71)

For Adorno, the musical avant-garde was synonymous with the designa tion of "new music," forms that demanded new modes of listening to cope

with the "shock of its strangeness and enigmatic form" (Adorno 2002:127). The process of listening to this new music is characterized by contempla tion, which operates in contrast to the regressive and infantile listening habits of the mass audience. Here, the new is linked with the necessity for

art, particularly music, to be complex and thought provoking, in contrast to the patterned, standardized, and pre-digested commodities produced and

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promoted by the culture industry. The more incomprehensible new music

is to the public?Adorno cites the work of Schoenberg?the more social

relevance it will attain, and thus become even more socially meaningful and

progressive (ibid.: 131). This question of difficulty and incomprehensibility is central to the notion of the avant-garde and one that both permeates and

perpetuates the exclusive nature of the Off Site community, while at the

same time, attracting new listeners who are allured by the very nature of

onky?'s esotericism and obscurity.

Many listeners I interviewed referred to the process of listening at Off

Site in pedagogical and disciplinary terms using such phrases as concentra

tion, comprehension, endurance, tension, and awareness or consciousness.

What is interesting here is the crucial impact of written discourse concerning

onky? on the listeners' reception and listening techniques. Some listeners I

spoke with sought out musician Otomo Yoshihide's personal blog in which he

devoted a regular series to the topic of listening and onky?. Several audience

members explained to me that they continued to come to Off Site because

they were unable to comprehend the music. One listener noted that Off Site was interesting specifically because he couldn't fathom what was going on; because he couldn't figure out how to listen to and enjoy (tanoshimeru) the performances, he returned numerous times.Yet another regular audience

member explained that he enjoyed the first shows he attended, but could not

articulate or comprehend why he enjoyed it, so he decided to attend more

shows. For other listeners, however, the incomprehensible nature of onky?

performances was not a thought-provoking or stimulating experience for the

spectator. One listener spoke of the first few concerts he attended: "When I first went to Off Site I was bored [akichatta]. There's very little change or

development in the music, which would be okay, except the sound wasn't

good either [kimochi ga yokunat]. But then I saw Otomo's homepage where

he wrote about onky? and listening [ch?shu] in various essays, and I read

those and thought,'Ah, so that's what it's all about' [laughs].And I realized that I could now understand it in this way" (p.c., 5 February 2006,Tokyo). He

further explained how after reading Otomo's blog he also became aware of

the outside sounds, which he didn't notice or hear when he first attended Off

Site. Such discourse concerning onky? was regularly produced and consumed

in Tokyo, and served a vital pedagogical function towards facilitating listeners'

comprehension and listening practices at Off Site.

One of the most ostentatious and significant features of the early twentieth

century European avant-garde was their often violent attempt at oppositionality and confrontation with the audience. Dadaist performances of sound poetry at

the Cabaret Voltaire caf? during WWI often erupted in a cacophonous battle

between the performers and spectators, a reaction that was desired by the art

ists (Kahn 1999:52). This interaction with the spectator was driven by their use

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of shock and was utilized as a productive force with which to both alienate and defamiliarize the viewer from their middle-class sensibilities. In his history of

listening in eighteenth century Paris, James Johnson equates the period when audiences became silent (i.e., the social roots of silence) with the rise of the

bourgeoisie and related notions of etiquette and respectability. Here, maintain

ing silence during a public performance was also a display of one's social mores

and such forms of etiquette were regularly circulated in etiquette books:"The

emergent code of silence during performances was more than an innocent and unreflective consequence of a certain work ethic. Audiences reasoned on some level that if politeness was necessary to succeed, its absence signaled

inferiority. Policing manners thus became an act of self-reassurance" (Johnson 1994:232). Dada performances blatantly attacked these societal mores and

hoped to shake up their very foundations in acts of sheer nihilism, with often no apparent goal other than to cause chaos and disruption.

In the case of onky?, the enforced silence and demands of listening are so amplified as to become reflexive. The audience member becomes aware

of his/her own body and the demands placed on it. Listeners are expected to concentrate and listen carefully to the performance as well as the outside

sounds, yet they themselves must not outwardly react to the music to the

point that they give up any self-control. The atmosphere and subtleties of the

performance become oppressive to the point that it produces a heightened awareness of space and the sensation of time. The shock of onky? as a new and unfamiliar form is completely internalized. Here, reception of the avant

garde techniques of shock and defamiliarization take the form of detached

yet highly disciplined listeners, in contrast to the Cabaret Voltaire. Some listeners described the process of listening to onky? performances as a test of endurance. One listener in particular, in referring to a musician known

for his lengthy periods of silence as part of his performance, explained: "In

Sugimoto's performances, there might be ten minutes of silence so you have to really be patient [gaman suru], but of course during those times, I would start to focus more on listening to the outside sounds. And because of that,

my ear has really changed" (p.c., 21 March 2006,Tokyo). By using the frequently uttered Japanese phrase gaman suru (patience)

to describe his experience as a listener, he indicates a sense of perseverance that the spectator of onky? must tolerate. Here, the idea of "grin and bear it" is relevant, for gaman suru also indicates the importance of enduring displeasure or suffering without complaining. Initially this might appear to

be an odd choice of wording to use for describing one's experience as an

audience member, for live music performances should be enjoyable and

pleasurable for the listeners. In the case of Off Site, onky? performances were not presented or experienced as casual "entertainment," as one might

expect at a live house performance. Instead, the music demanded rigorous,

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concentrated listening, in order for audience members to "enter the music,"

as one Off Site musician explained to me (p.c., 12 November 2004,Tokyo). One listener explained the impossibility of listening to onky? recordings at home as casual background music:

When I listen to this kind of music, I try not to do anything else, otherwise it's

completely meaningless. When I listen to classical music at home for example, I'll hear a gorgeous melody or dignified sounding chords. Or if I listen to opera such as Wagner, I'll focus on the flow of the story. If I listen to jazz, I'll think

about the improvisation and exciting interplay between musicians while I'm

listening. But when you listen to onky?, absolutely all you have to listen to is

the sound, so you know, I really can't do anything else while I'm listening."(p.c., 20 March 2006,Tokyo)

Along these lines, most musicians, critics and listeners agree that onky? is a genre that must initially be directly and physically experienced (taiken suru). One recent review of an emblematic onky? recording by a musician who performed regularly at Off Site notes that attempts at an extremely simple description will never become a true explanation of the artwork, because "such a challenging work can only exist as a concrete and material

experience, to be directly and intimately experienced within its live context"

(Unami 2005:217). Textual analysis of onky? such as in recording reviews or criticism is a nearly impossible task, in which any attempt to pin down and ascribe meaning to such an elusive and abstract form?described by one critic as a genre that "exceeds hearing" (kiku koete) (p.c.,Hatanaka Minoru, 25 March 2005,Tokyo)?is an ineffable process, and one which seemingly defeats the premise of the avant-garde. One listener grappled with the inher ent difficulty in evaluating or judging onky? performances:"How do you do that? I don't even know myself, but I continued to listen.You really can't de scribe it, you know? I'm genuinely moved by this music, but if I try to explain it to people, they'll laugh. If you try to explain the sound of 'piiii' [imitates the sound of a sine wave] or a hissing sound to someone, it's like a joke! [laughs] For me, that's the ultimate mystery of music" (p.c., 20 March 2006,

Tokyo). Although onky? musicians release studio and even live recordings, it is the (anti)sensuality of onky?'s live performances that are of the foremost

significance. This condition speaks to the centrality of the unpredictable live

experience, including outside sounds filtering into the performance space which, in turn, engage with the sounds of the music and serve to trouble the tenuous divide between music and non-musical sound.

As stated earlier, within the category of outside sounds are sounds gener ated by the listeners themselves, which thus raises the issue of the intention

ality regarding outside sounds. While street sounds are certainly random and

carry no intent, the human element opens up a completely different set of

contingencies. Onky?'s live performance context provokes its listeners to

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both create and adopt individual bodily techniques. One listener explained to me how he made sure to not drink any alcohol prior to the performance, to avoid falling asleep during the concert. Such preparation reveals the extent to which audience members have consciously absorbed certain modes of

etiquette. Another listener adopted different strategies to stay awake:

Even if I'm enjoying the show, I tend to fall asleep. At live shows I always have

gum with me, and I would start chewing gum right before the performance. But

because the gum starts to get hard about midway through the performance, I

would end up making sound, so I think that I actually unintentionally became

one of the performers [laughs]. The main reason for chewing gum was to not

fall asleep. On a certain level, the purpose was also to help with concentrating on the performance [sh?ch?]. If I forget to bring gum with me to a show, I real

ize I've made a big mistake?it's like going to a Noise show without ear plugs.

(p.c., 5 February 2006,Tokyo)

During this same interview he explained his particular listening techniques, influenced by reading Otomo's blog essays: "I would try to keep my mind

completely empty [karappo ni suru] and cease any kind of thinking, so I wouldn't have any sort of awareness or consciousness that 'I'm currently

listening to sound.' I tried not to think or react at all to the music" (p.c., 5

February 2006,Tokyo). Another listener explained the appeal of closing one's eyes during the

performance by likening it to a dreamlike and otherworldly state, and noted that it was easier to concentrate on the "incredibly delicate, small sounds" if

one's eyes were closed (p.c., 15 August 2005,Tokyo). If the listeners' eyes are

open, as she explained to me, the performance is not as interesting and it also becomes difficult to focus and concentrate on the subtle sounds of the perfor mance. Similar to the previous listener, she had also read Otomo's blog, which facilitated her listening experiences and techniques at Off Site. She referred to a particular entry in which he discussed listening techniques he learned in a workshop, wherein the listener attempts to clear their consciousness

(ishikt) and actively sever connections between sounds and their referents, for example, hearing the sound of a car and consciously thinking "that's the

sound of a car."As she noted: "He [Otomo] explained that in this exercise the

listener clears their consciousness as much as possible, then gradually sound

begins to dissolve. I think by closing my eyes, there's a similar effect. When I

close my eyes I try to get rid of these types of associations, such as 'this is the

sound of a chair,' etc., as much as possible" (p.c., 15 August 2005,Tokyo). For

both of these listeners then, the discourse and knowledge surrounding onky?, as gleaned from Otomo's writings, often preceded the performance itself and

provided them with listening techniques that are crucial in order to meaning

fully enter the music. This movement reveals what Georgina Born referred to as the "pedagogic and prescriptive mission" (Born 1995:42) of the avant

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garde in which listeners are challenged to approach the music discursively, rather than simply attending live shows as sheer entertainment, in the case of a live house performance. By learning to hear in this way, listeners at Off Site retrained their ears in order to perceive such outside sounds fundamental to Off Site's live experience.

In his analysis of habitus, Pierre Bourdieu describes the unconscious

techniques of the body, such as sitting up straight, as the "cunning of peda gogic reason" (Bourdieu [1977] 1992:69). I discussed the topic of Off Site's listeners with a musician who performed regularly at Off Site for all five years of its operation. This musician attributed the disciplined nature of Off Site's audience?and Japanese audiences more generally?to Japanese pedagogical and schooling techniques. She explained:"I think you can say their manners

[ogy?gi] are good. I mean, Japanese people are the best at properly sitting down and listening quietly And they learned this at school from a young age" (p.c., 25 July 2005,Tokyo). In that same interview, she interpreted Off Site's

disciplined listening environment as a microcosm of Tokyo, which she views as radically distinct from and ultimately irreconcilable with the social context of Europe and the U.S. Here, the social etiquette and bodily comportment necessary to navigate through everyday urban life inTokyo signifies the polite, disciplined, and most importantly, learned aesthetic conduct demanded of

onky?'s listeners as Japanese citizens. She noted:"Japan is a cramped country, so you've always got to be moving. We're naturally trained [kunren] to be aware of this. For example, if you're in a small, narrow space, you've got to

make sure to not bump into the person next to you" (p.c., 25 July 2005,To kyo).Her usage of the term kunren implies training or discipline on the part of the Japanese citizen, particularly pedagogical discipline and recalls Mauss'

notion of body techniques,"the ways in which from society to society men know how to use their bodies" (Mauss [1950] 1979:97). These techniques, such as walking, running, dancing, and jumping, among others, are learned via training and education. For this regular Off Site musician, the cramped performance space at Off Site is a metaphor for public urban space in Tokyo, such as the subway, where people must attempt to avoid unnecessary colli

sions with their neighbors. They are able to avoid such awkward collisions due to their training from a young age, as she explained to me. Moreover, because the space itself is so cramped and the audience is sitting so close to the performers, there is a feeling of inescapability, experienced by some of the musicians as well. This same musician explained to me that the tension and anxiety some musicians felt performing at Off Site was partially due to the extremely close proximity of the audience. A regular listener at Off Site also experienced this sensation, explaining that part of the tension she

originally felt at performances was because the listeners sat so close to the musicians. However, after she became personally acquainted with many of

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Off Site's regular performers, primarily by hanging out on the second floor caf? space in the period following shows, she began to feel less tension (p.c., 8 August 2005,Tokyo).

The performance and reception of onky? ultimately relies on the cre

ation and maintenance of a disciplined listening public in Tokyo. The kind of disciplined listening found at Off Site may be partially traced to listening

practices at Japan 's jazz kissa (jazz coffee shops), which served as social, if

cramped, spaces during the 1960s and 1970s for jazz aficionados to gather and listen to jazz recordings and obtain information regarding the music, such as magazines and handouts. The experience of collectively and intently listening to jazz was central to the jazz kissa experience. Eschewing the typi cal background status of music at caf?s in Japan, the volume at jazz kissa was

deliberately and provocatively loud, rendering any conversation between

neighbors difficult, if not impossible. Patrons were generally expected to be

quiet. In his history of jazz in Japan, E. Taylor Atkins briefly mentions the role of listeners in jazz kissa, who must often agree to the establishment's rules of maintaining silence (Atkins 2001:4).

In the case of Off Site's listening public, the boundaries of this social

group are often made visible at performances, in which new listeners? unaccustomed to onky?'s performance conditions?question and critique the structured environment within which onky? is heard. Although many

musicians at Off Site proclaim to be open to these outside sounds, they also

expect and demand absolute silence and stillness on the part of the audience,

which ultimately drives certain listeners further away from the performers and reinforces exclusionary boundaries. Such boundaries further consolidate the insularity of the Off-Site community, to the point where certain Tokyo based music writers or listeners make a deliberate point of avoiding perfor mances at Off Site so as not to participate in this community.

During Tokyo's typically muggy summer months, for example, the air

conditioning is often turned off during music performances as the constant

drone of the air-conditioner overpowers the sounds of the music performance and creates a distraction in the listening environment. I attended one such concert during the summer where the air-conditioning had been turned off, which quickly caused the windowless room, filled to capacity, to become

stuffy. The air was soon thick and heavy with humidity. During intermission, one audience member in particular, revealed their outsider status by directly confronting the musician and questioning their choice to shut off the air

conditioning. After the musician explained the necessity of a silent listening environment free from the sonic distractions of machinery humming in the

background, the audience member stormed off angrily and left before the second half resumed. Such visceral reactions by certain audience members

signify the exclusivity of Off Site's community, by revealing the gap between

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expectations of proper listening and improper listening. Here, proper listen

ing at Off Site, and other similar avant-garde performance spaces in Tokyo, is contingent on the inculcation of certain modes of behavior?knowledge of which only regular attendees would be aware. Regular attendees, includ

ing members of the tight-knit community of musicians, critics and listeners, would never outwardly or publicly question the unspoken rules governing Off Site's specific listening conditions.

These unforeseen events, which inevitably occur at onky? performances,

ultimately contribute to the highly disciplined and tense listening environ

ment?one which is seldom acknowledged as such by the performers.10 If at

first glance audience members attend live music performances as an escape from the rapid-fire repetitions of capitalist life, then onky? performances,

with their inevitable penetration of the quotidian soundscape, ironically act as a reminder of the banality of urban existence. This eventfulness jolts the listeners and performers out of the repetitive high art/classical music

environment and into the urban accidental realm of the everyday.

Beyond Off Site: Post-Onky?-ha?

The final performance at Off Site, on 30 April 2005, perhaps not surpris

ingly, was marked by certain accidental events, or happenings, the aftermath of

which soon began to circulate through public talk-forums, as well as musicians'

and critics' blogs in Japan. Word quickly spread throughout Tokyo regarding Off Site's impending closure, and the final performance was guaranteed to be

well attended. Although tickets for Off Site performances could usually only be purchased at the door, in this case, advance reservations by e-mail were re

quired. A second show on the same night was even added due to overwhelming demand to see the final show. By this point, five years after opening, most were

well aware of Off Site's extremely cramped performance space, as witnessed by a sizable group already lined up thirty minutes prior to the doors opening for better seating. It was during the second show of Off Site's final performance that something occurred which threw off not only the other listeners in the

room, but the performers as well. Soon after the musicians began amid a typi

cally silent audience, those in the room heard the faint sounds of breathing, which was soon followed by light snoring. As one of the performers that night

explained to me:"This was our absolutely final performance at Off Site, so we

were concentrating incredibly intensely and this heavy breathing [neikt] was

louder than the sounds of our own performance! Because it was our last per formance there ever, I decided that I simply did not want to perform alongside such noise, so I asked the person sitting next to the man sleeping to wake him

up" (p.c., Sachiko M, 25 July 2005,Tokyo). Ito noted how this was actually the first time he had ever heard this mu

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sician speak during the performance and address the audience. In reference to this incident, one local musician, who attended shows at Off Site regu

larly, admitted the incongruity between the musicians' purported embrace of such outside sounds and their control and regulation over sounds made

by the audience as witnessed in this final performance:"The musicians at Off Site were receptive to these outside sounds that entered the performance space, but the sound of snoring itself was heard as noise, which I realize is

contradictory. For the listeners and performers who hear the performance as music, snoring becomes a disturbance or distraction \jyama)" (p.c., 23 October 2005,Tokyo).

If music is that which must be heard (kikakeru beki mono), then onky?, as barely audible sound, is meant to privilege listeners' ears and their percep tion and judgment of what is constituted as music or non-music. This shift in emphasis from reception to the sense of hearing requires the listener to

undergo disciplinary techniques that affect both mind and body, and as such, the listener becomes integral to the experience of live onky? performance. The discursive construction of onky?, as consolidated on musicians' blogs, public talk events and in print media, was crucial in order for audience mem bers to learn how to listen in a particular way. Off Site's specific spatial and material conditions generated new modes of listening and performing, and

placed incredible demands on the body that at times were stifling. At the same

time however, the allure of this incomprehensible and seemingly inaudible

music?despite its disciplined and strained listening environment?led many listeners to attend repeat performances at Off Site. The contradiction that

was the attraction of Off Site is perhaps best described by Otomo Yoshihide, "The limits of Off Site were not really limits but total freedom" (p.c., Otomo

Yoshihide, 8 June 2005,Tokyo). Within this confined space and concomitant

genre was the potential for minute transgressions that jolted the listener in such a way that was perhaps not the Cabaret Voltaire, but something much

quieter.

Acknowledgements This article is excerpted from a chapter in my forthcoming dissertation. Research is based on

ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tokyo between 2004 and 2007, and was supported by research funding from the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship Program and the International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship Program of the Social Sci ence Research Council with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I am indebted to all the musicians, listeners, and critics at Off Site who generously allowed me to conduct such extensive interviews, especially Ito Atsuhiro, Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M and Akiyama Tetuzi.

Finally, this essay benefitted greatly from the critical and productive comments provided by editors Timothy Cooley and Barbara Taylor, the two anonymous readers, as well as Marilyn Ivy, David J. Kim, Lauren Meeker, and Jennifer Milioto Matsue. I welcome correspondence regarding this article. I can be reached at: [email protected]

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Plourde: Disciplined Listening in Tokyo 293

Notes

1. Japanese names are represented with the family name first followed by the given name

second, except for certain musicians or artists who use their given name first, such as Sachiko

M andTetuziAkiyama. 2. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the genealogy of Futurism in Japan,

however, it is worth pointing out the contemporaneity of Italian Futurism's reception in Japan. The founding manifesto of Italian Futurism, written by Filippo Marinetti, was translated into

Japanese and published in May 1909 by novelist and critic Ogai Mori, just three months after

its original publication in Paris.

3. John Cage, along with David Tudor, first performed in Japan in October of 1962 at the

SogetsuArt Center (SAC), which served as one of the most important sites for avant-garde activi

ties in the 1960s. Cage's performance caused a huge sensation within Tokyo's avant-garde music

and art community, to the extent that the aftermath was dubbed "Cage shock" (k?ji shokku) by local music critic Yoshida Hidekazu (Galliano 2002:255). This shock of Cage's encounter with

Japan was ultimately seen as productive and one that indirectly transfigured (henyo) the state

of avant-garde music in Japan by sparking debates over indeterminacy in music and the role of

environmental sounds within the live performance context. John Cage and his philosophies of

silence and non-intentional sound remain a formidable presence in contemporary Japan, a fact

evidenced by the various special issues on Cage in Tokyo-based magazines and journals, as well

as continued reference to Cage in pamphlets and handouts distributed at contemporary live

performances. At the same time, however, Cage's legacy remains divided within Tokyo's avant

garde experimental music community. For some, Cage signifies the West's misunderstanding of Japan. During an interview with Tokyo-based music and film critic KishinoYuichi,he argued: "You have people like John Cage and Allen Ginsberg, they all loved Zen, right? When European or American people encounter Japanese avant-garde music, as something which is unknown to

them and difficult to comprehend, they always explain it as Zen. This is just too simple." (p.c., 1 February 2006,Tokyo).

4. It is perhaps not coincidental that both Akita and Haino are staunch vegetarians/vegans. Akita has recently become a strong proponent of the animal rights movement, a philosophy that he has begun to fuse with his musical output. His forays into animal rights activism and its

linkages with experimental music and noise is documented in his recent 2005 book, Watashi no saishoku seikatsu [cruelty free life]. Many musicians and critics I spoke with in Tokyo agreed that in the case of Akita and Haino, their stoicism was partly attributed to their strict vegetarian

lifestyles, in addition to their extreme (kyokutan) and uncompromising musical aesthetics.

5.At the time of attendance at Off Site, the exchange rate of one US dollar averaged ap

proximately 105 Japanese yen. 6. For a fascinating discussion of the impact of the introduction of chairs into the Javanese

gamelan performance setting, see Pemberton 1987. 7. In her ethnographic analysis of recent South Indian (Karnatic) classical music perfor

mance conventions, Amanda Weidman discusses the importance, and almost purposeful staging, of uneventfulness within the live context. She explains that "the more classical the music, the less there is to watch on stage" (Weidman 2003:135).

8. All interviews were conducted in Japanese and have been translated into English by the author.

9. Prior to first attending shows at Off Site, one listener explained his musical forays during this time as a period in which he avidly sought out CD's of Fluxus and minimalist music, among others.

10. Not all musicians reacted negatively to these outside sounds on the part of the listeners.

After one performance at Off Site, I overheard an audience member apologize to the owner for

her coughing fit during the performance. His response was quite amiable; he pointed out that

her coughs had perhaps become a part of the music.

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294 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2008

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