Yasunao Tone & Hecker

It is without hyperbole to call Yasunao Tone a pioneer of improvisational and, later, digital experiments in music. He began in 1960, founding Group Ongaku, then joined the Fluxus movement in 1962. In the early ’80s, he began his experiments with CDs eventually coming to the idea of "wounding” them in any number of ways to scramble the digital information, thus forcing the disc to improvise. In 2004, he recorded Palimpsest as a duo with Florian Hecker, a man 43 years his junior, and the noise is deafening. To describe the contents of the disc is only possible through wild metaphors. It sounds like a hearing aid picking up all the fax tones in London, England simultaneously; three dozen electric shavers stuffed into R2D2 who is then dragged repeatedly through underbrush made of magnets; and of a Kurt Schwitters fan with Tourette’s programming every guitar solo by Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen and Joe Satriani into a hyper zip file and then transmitting it to all his likeminded friends via his 56 kps modem, where you happen to be trapped inside. If all this sounds like fun to you (and I know it does to some) this is the disc for you.