Yasunao Tone, the avant-garde composer and artist who was a key player in the Japanese wing of the Fluxus movement, died in a New York hospital on Monday, May 12, The New York Times reports. Tone co-founded the influential music and art outfits Group Ongaku and Team Random in Tokyo, before moving to New York in the early 1970s and expanding his glitch music and multimedia art practice alongside contemporaries such as Yoko Ono. He was 90 years old.
Tone specialized in dadaist and surrealist literature at Tokyo’s Chiba University. Alongside his studies, he played saxophone in experimental bands and, shortly after graduating, formed Group Ongaku with collaborators including Mieko Shiomi and the late Takehisa Kosugi. In New York, he collaborated with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, of which Kosugi would become director in 1995, and composed radical solo music in a style he conceived in a 1961 essay as “Anti-Music.” This was a core Fluxus principle: demystifying music and art objects—and in the process the digital media that carries them—to explore “the system of music itself,” as he put it in a 1997 interview. “We use a kind of technique that can be used by any lay people. It doesn’t require any special training. That is essentially a Fluxus philosophy.”
Tone’s work with scratched CDs in the mid-1980s drew attention beyond art circles, using glitches and electronic manipulation to undermine the precision of digital media. His avant-garde records and performances anticipated the electronic brinksmanship of important 1990s labels like Warp and Mille Plateaux; in that era, Tone continued to release forward music, such as the landmark 1997 noise album Solo for Wounded. His work in music and art spaces continued into recent years, including two long pieces released in 2017, AI Deviation #1 and #2, that applied his methods to artificial intelligence.
