Minimal Wave Records

“I was born in 1955.
I was a boy who liked class­ical music and electronic han­dic­raft.
After that I met up with Ger­man Ex­periment­al Rock.
It was a be­ginn­ing of my mus­ical ac­tiv­ity.
I re­cor­ded Polaroid in 1980 in the li­v­ing room of a Tokyo apart­ment house with my broth­er on voc­als.
It was my debut song re­leased by the Japanese label Van­ity Re­cords.
In the 90s, I chan­ged my mus­ical form to TECH­NO. And now, I am a Theremin maker.”
-Yosihumi Niinuma

From ROCK MAGAZINE, speci­al thanks to Sam for this trans­la­tion:

“Sym­pat­hy nerv­ous” comes from the sym­pat­hetic nerv­ous sys­tem – I basical­ly took the word ‘sym­pat­hetic’ and switched it with ‘sym­pat­hy.’ I wrote a multi­plex piece cal­led “Electric Nerv­ous” under my own one-man-band, so it’s re­lated to that work as well.

I think it’s going towards a di­rec­tion where I can just let myself free to electronics. Rath­er than tak­ing con­trol of them, I’m al­low­ing my body to as­similate with the de­vices. In the end, I’m going to be the one caught in its pace, with very lit­tle area for me to di­rect. I’m also con­sider­ing giv­ing them a lit­tle more of that ‘dub­bed’ touch. I can take sounds that have been pre-recorded, and pro­cess them, like pick­ing up drum gates - just an idea.

The rea­son it takes over five hours to set up is be­cause all of our syn­thesiz­ers’ modules are separate. I take and con­trol each part with a UCG - “Uni­vers­al Charact­er Generator.” I ac­tual­ly gave it that name myself. There are a lot of peo­ple using this tech­nique el­sewhere, but it hasn’t been sys­temized as a popular met­hod here in Japan so I just call it that. In the end, I’m tak­ing every­th­ing that used to be done by human hands – like giv­ing it a vib­rato or add­ing sounds – and auto­mat­ing it with a clock. Our sys­tem’s going to con­tinue grow­ing like plants! I can take my com­put­er and do some lengthy pro­gramm­ing, and even clean my ec­hoes. But with the sys­tem we have right now, we have to go on con­nect­ing each line. Since it takes four or five wires for each module, it’d take up to 70 to 100 wires to do all songs. That’s why the set up takes so long, al­though of co­ur­se it’s most­ly about gett­ing used to it. I’ll just have to come up with some­th­ing more ef­ficient.

I want to pur­sue a plant-root like growth. But if I were going to focus more on shows, there’s a lot to give up - ob­vious­ly I’d pre­f­er to carry around fewer equip­ments. I also don’t want to de­pend too much on cas­settes, be­cause in the end, our per­for­mance could be de­graded down to simp­ly play­ing tapes on stage. I’d rath­er cent­er our ac­tiv­ity on re­cord­ings, using os­cillators and filt­ers to create live sounds of that mo­ment.