Interview with Otomo Yoshihide, The Mastery of Guitar & Turntable Achieved in His Mid-60s Part.2 (1/3)
2024-02-28
author:Narushi Hosoda
The second part of an extensive interview with Otomo Yoshihide, a musician who has built a unique career spanning more than 35 years. This part focuses on his almost-unprecedented musical practices as an experimental turntablist.
In the first part of this interview, Otomo Yoshihide expressed his confidence about his performance, stating that he can play the guitar and turntable at his best right now. In Solo Works 1 Guitar and Turntable (2023), Otomo clearly shows his improvisational skills as an improviser who has reached such a state of freedom. This album was released by Little Stone Records, a newly founded label that released “Stone Stone Stone,” an album of Otomo’s Special Big Band in 2022. The label is planning to release more of Otomo’s solo works such as “Solo Works 2,” a live album and “Solo Works 3,” the one being conceived around the theme of Christian Marclay.
In the second part of the interview, we asked him about his almost-unprecedented musical practices as an experimental turntablist. While his starting point was improvisational collaging, he took a cue from kung-fu movies (!) to play the turntable faster. It also delves into his unique path in which his extreme turntable performance without using records led to his installation works. Besides, perhaps it’s surprising to many listeners, Otomo also says of himself that he “may not be from the context of free improvisation.”
The Impact of Christian Marclay
–In the second part of the interview, I would like to ask you mainly about your work around turntables. Your career as a turntable player began in earnest after you left Masayuki Takayanagi, didn’t it?
Otomo Yoshihide (Otomo): Yes, that’s right. But in fact, I had been performing since I was with Mr. Takayanagi. I was not allowed to perform live, so I only performed in front of the audience just a few times, and most of my performances were recorded at home though. So I started performing in earnest after I left Mr. Takayanagi’s place.
–I heard that you had been making music with a tape recorder since you were a child, although not on turntables.
Otomo: I used to make sound collages with a tape recorder when I was in middle and high school. So I initially wanted to use turntables to create those too, which is why I started it in a completely different context from hip-hop.
–Does collage mean what is called “musique concrète” (concrete music)?
Otomo: Yeah, I wanted to do an improvised version of musique concrete that Pierre Schaeffer would do. But it was only after I met Christian Marclay that I started working solely on turntables. Until then, I had been using cassette tapes or open-reel tapes along with turntables, but Christian made me think it would be cooler to play only on turntables. That realization came even before I heard his music, and I only saw a photo depicting Christian.
–Is that the famous “Phono Guitar” photo in which he plays the turntable slung over his shoulder like a guitar?
Otomo: No, it wasn’t that one. I saw a picture of him playing on four turntables set side by side and thought it was genuinely cool. So something like an imaginary Christian Marclay is one of the starting points of turntable playing for me. I heard his sound for the first time in Teruto Soejima’s documentary film, which was 8mm film footage of the “Moers Jazz Festival 1984.” After that, I also heard Christian’s sound on a John Zorn’s record, maybe around 1984 or 1985, and I was fascinated by how cool it was. I guess I was already playing completely on turntables only by then.
–You also went to see Christian Marclay’s first performance in Japan in 1986, didn’t you?
Otomo: Of course. I saw all of his Tokyo shows. Or rather, I acted as an assistant to Christian when he came to Japan. It was part of Teruto Soejima’s project. The year before the show, Mr. Soejima asked me, “I am thinking of inviting David Moss to Japan, and I have the budget to invite one more person. Who would you like to invite? I said, “Definitely, Christian Marclay, I’ll help you with that!” (Laughs.) So, during the visit, I followed Christian around every day to help out. And when I saw Christian’s performance in person, I realized I could not compete with him. He was just so cool. The speed and the choice of records were so incredible that I could only prostrate in front of him.
The improvisational collage seemed overwhelmingly new
–Did you find different kind of pleasure in playing the turntables than in playing the guitar?
Otomo: To begin with, it requires an entirely different type of technique. Turntable performance seemed overwhelmingly new to me back then in that it allowed me to collage improvisationally, which was different from composing collages. I was able to create collages from recorded materials extemporarily. There were no proper samplers at the time, so the improvised collages seemed so new to me. It seemed to have potential. I felt like I could go beyond the cassette tape collages I had been doing before that.
At the time, Masayuki Takayanagi was working on a cassette tape collage, and I was the one who had made the equipment for him. So I had been doing that kind of collage for quite a while; cassette collages inevitably end up being like compositional works in terms of production speed. Turntable production is more improvisational and cooler than that. In that sense, what struck me the most musically in my life was, after all, the moment I saw Christian Marclay’s live show.
Now I can confess that the one of the biggest reasons why I left Mr. Takayanagi was the encounter with Christian Marclay. He made me want to do shows right away, but Mr. Takayanagi wouldn’t let me do them if I kept studying under him. To be honest, I had been doing shows in secret even before I met Christian, but after that, I was like, all I wanted to do was do shows. Then, my show was introduced in a magazine, which led to a massive argument. That’s how I ran away from Mr. Takayanagi. Therefore, in retrospect, Christian was the catalyst for that.
–In the 1980s, it was very rare to have a live experimental turntable performance at jazz-oriented venues, wasn’t it? Or maybe you were the only one who do that kind of performance. How did the musicians around you recognize that?
Otomo: Yeah, I was lonely. Most of the so-called jazz folks didn’t recognize me. However, there were some people who were interested in me back then, such as Junji Hirose, Kyoko Kuroda, Hideki Kato, Masahiro Uemura, Yuji Katsui, and Naruyoshi Kikuchi. After joining Ms. Kuroda’s band in 1987, I started to get acquainted with jazz musicians. But I didn’t necessarily want to play jazz at that time. It just so happened that I did my first performance in the jazz scene. Then I started playing with Hoppy Kamiyama and Reck, leading me to play in the rock scene. I felt that rock was much more open than jazz music at the time. It was like, anything that sounds interesting was affirmed in the rock context. I remember now that when I played rock with Hoppy Kamiyama and Reck, I also played the guitar.
So, it was all about Mr. Takayanagi, after all. I think there was an excuse in my mind that “rock music has nothing to do with Mr. Takayanagi.” I played noise guitar in the rock shows but occasionally played rhythm guitar too. I felt at ease with Hoppy Kamiyama and Reck’s band because there was no linkage with Mr. Takayanagi. It was when I went to jazz shows, you know, that I couldn’t take my guitar with me. My excuse for playing live on the turntables was like, “It’s OK to play live because it’s not a guitar” (laughs). The presence of Mr. Takayanagi was such a big part of my life. But as you just said, turntables were indeed rare at that time. No one except for hip-hop players brought in turntables. On top of that, in my case, I was using a turntable that I had made myself, not a Technics turntable. There was no one like that in Japan.
