Yasunao’s career, despite dating back to the 1950s, influenced contemporary electronic music styles like glitch and IDM.
Yasunao Tone — a multidisciplinary music visionary whose ideas echo throughout modern electronic music — has died at the age of 90. No cause of death has been disclosed at the time of writing.
According to an Instagram post by Artists Space, Tone passed away on Monday, May 12. The New York Times reports that the nonprofit, which organized a 2023 retrospective of his career called Region of Paramedia, later confirmed that he passed away in a New York hospital.
“Tone was a groundbreaking artist, composer, and theorist who spent his life interrogating the limits of emerging technology,” wrote Artists Space in their post.
Born in Tokyo in 1935, Yasunao Tone studied literature at Chiba National University during Japan’s postwar period. He wrote his thesis on Western cultural movements like Dadaism and surrealism, the research for which planted some of the philosophical seeds that would later grow into his most influential ideas.
One such premise was outlined in his 1961 essay “Toward Anti Music.” In it, he observed a Western trend toward “abstract music” with less traditional tonal structure, citing examples like European musique concréte and American indeterminate music a la John Cage. Around the same time, Tone started to contribute to this output in his own way via experimental outfit Group Ongaku (which literally translates to “music” in Japanese).
Tone also founded the Japanese branch of European touring festival Fluxus, was a participant in radical Japanese art collective Hi-Red Center, and joined the country’s first computer art collective, Team Random. His first symphonic score, Anagram for Strings, was published in 1963 and translated to English by Yoko Ono.
In 1972, Yasunao Tone moved to New York, continuing to compose music and concoct other multimedia projects for various institutions. He first experimented with making music via scratched CD discs in 1984, efforts that culminated in 1986 performance Music for 2 CD Players at the Experimental Media Foundation.
Resident Advisor notes that Tone’s ideas — both in theory and practice — helped influence the aesthetic of visionary dance music labels like WARP Records. The imprint famously platformed the likes of Aphex Twin, Autechre, and Squarepusher.
“You have to deviate,” Tone advised creatives in a 1997 interview. “Manufacturers always force us to use a product their way…however, people occasionally find a way to deviate from the original purpose of the medium and develop a totally new field.” His adventurous attitude is all the more impressive when you take into account that he had to contend with Japan’s collectivist culture in the early years of his career.
We here at EDM Identity express our sincere condolences to the family and loved ones of Yasunao Tone during what can only be a difficult time.
