Yasunao Tone - Definition and Overview

Yasunao Tone is a Japanese artist has worked with many different types of media throught his career. He was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1935, and he graduated from Chiba Japanese National University in 1957, majoring in Japanese literature. He became active in the Fluxus movement in the 1960's and moved to the United States in 1972.

Yasunao Tone is known mostly for his musical work. His techniques are unconventional. For example, for his album Solo for the Wounded CD, he damaged compact discs and used the information that a CD player was able to extract from those dics, to make new songs. For his collaboration with Hecker, Palimpset, he converted Japanese Man'yo poems to sound.

Always active in America with avant-garde music artists, he has been awarded a CAPS Grant in multi-media, a New York State Council on the Arts commission grant for flutist Barbara Held, a National Endowment for the Arts grant for collaborative work with Blondell Cummings and Senga Nengdi, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in performance/emerging forms.

External links and Sources

• Yasunao Tone Biography (http://www.lovely.com/bios/tone.html)
• UBU Web Fluxus page with a MP3 of a piece by Yasunao Tone (http://www.ubu.com/sound/flux_tellus.html)