Biography
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Born
11 November 1943
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Born In
Kyoto, Kyoto, Japan
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Died
18 May 2021 (aged 77)
Yoshimasa "Yoshi" Wada (和田義正, born November 11, 1943), is a Japanese sound installation artist and musician living in the United States. He lived in New York for many years but now lives in San Francisco, California.
Born in Kyoto, Japan, Wada joined the Fluxus movement in 1968 after meeting George Maciunas. He also studied with the North Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath. Wada's works often incorporate the use of drone and are usually performed at very high volume, allowing for the overtones within the sound to be heard very clearly.
He frequently performs his own compositions, which feature much freedom of improvisation, on Scottish highland bagpipe and voice, and also employs a number of homemade instruments. These include "pipe horns" (very long horn-type instruments made from metal plumbing pipe) as well as large reed instruments involving multiple bagpipe-like pipes connected to a large air compressor; due to their appearance, Wada named these latter instruments "Alligator" and "the Elephantine Crocodile". His music has been scarcely released on recordings, having seen only two LP releases, on the India Navigation (1982) and FMP labels. Lament For The Rise and Fall of Elephantine Crocodile, The Appointed Cloud and Off the Wall were reissued by Japanese labels EM Records and Editions Omega Point in 2008.
Wada is also known for his mechanical and robotic installations. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in the mid-1990s, he performed a whimsically entitled piece, Lament for the Rise and Fall of Handy-Horn, in which several compressed-air "auditory flare" signals used for nautical emergencies (the "Handy Horn" brand named in the title) were sounded for the duration of their usefulness, giving rise to an alarmingly high-decibel air-pressure environment and charged psychoacoustic environment.
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