Satoru Wono was born in Japan in 1964 and lives today in Tokyo. Composer, producer, DJ, writer and critic, he is Assistant Professor at Tama University in Tokyo. He is also the author of a number of important books on music and technology.

It suffices to consider the quantity and diversity of works that Satoru Wono has composed or produced in order to be aware of just exactly what he has been able to develop in such directions that, to our occidental eyes, may appear contradictory. His strength resides in his capacity to compose pieces of contemporary music, to be a renowned producer of pop, to work as a music promoter while attempting to preserve an atypical approach and the personal reflection that is necessary for musical experimentation. One example of Satoru Wono's artistic versatility: as the musical director of the famous Maywa Denki, a Japanese artist's collective that turns crazy objets d'art into mass produced commodities, he has worked on such products as tap dancing shoes that incorporate triggers for the toes, devices for automatic percussion, trees for electric guitars… A member of the Japanese Max/MSP community Commu (together with Yuko Nexus6 for whom he produced her second album Neko san Kill! Kill!), his connections with the Japanese experimental music scene are numerous.

Satoru Wono loves to recycle and transfer onto his own works certain sound materials that are usually used within other forms of music. While Satoru Wono's treatment of microscopic sounds is precise and exacting, his pieces playfully draw out something of the extremely (re)creative. His mode of composition can certainly be seen as a counterpoint to current music trends. Let us take for example his sublime album Sauvage, and listen to the vinyl scratching compositions. Isn't it fascinating to discover the progressive constructions, the aggregate rhythms, that allow us to uncover abstract lines that are nonetheless legible, nonmusical but still danceable!

Let us concentrate now on his album Orgelpunkt on which Satoru Wono accomplishes a magnificent work of original recomposition. Notice the cutting up and reappropriation of snatches of the harmonium, likewise the glimmers of mechanical music, reminiscent of Gyorgy Ligeti's barrel organ. Recently, on his album String Quartet, Satoru Wono delivered an exercise in risk-taking. He decided create a composition for a string quartet using a technique taken from IT: the "cut and paste" function. Thus, he wrote 48 one-minute pieces and, placing the musicians in specific acoustic conditions, asked them to play, to improvise or to loop certain bars. No development, no climax is to be expected, it is a musical mise en situation for the exploration of an acoustic condition.

His Sonata album emerges from only two sounds: sine wave and white noise. Sine wave, the scientifically simplest tone containing no harmonic and white noise, the fullest sound, that absorbs all frequencies, containing everything. An ocean unto itself. Nowadays, in both pop and experimental music fields both composers and performers are primarily concerned by "sound" itself. However, when Satoru Wono decides to contrain himself with such limited sound elements it reflects his main obsession: "structure". This work reveals a great musical content with a rhythmic impact and an insidious groove. The actual result undoubtedly blurs the existing borders between experimental and pop music. Sonata is a physical experience within a intellectual framework.

WONO Satoru links
Official Homepage:
www.swono.com/­