Onkyo

Onkyo is a Japanese current of free improvisation that developed in Tokyo in the late 1990s, named for the word meaning sound or acoustics, in which musicians such as *Otomo Yoshihide*, *Sachiko M* and *Toshimaru Nakamura* explore the physical properties of sound itself — sine tones, feedback from a no-input mixing board, the empty sampler's test tones — at low volumes and with long silences. Performed in small venues where the audience's own noise becomes part of the piece, onkyo prizes texture, timbre and placement over expression or interaction in the jazz sense, and it converges with European reductionism and lowercase music.