without records

Sessions A and B: July 5 (sat.) – October 13 (mon.)
Foyer – Gallery 2F – Courtyard

Otomo Yoshihide＋Yasutomo Aoyama

In this installation, there are about a hundred portable record players without records, but equipped with unusual materials such as corrugated paper or iron. In the space of the foyer, turntables scattered everywhere, high and low, right and left, produce noises by the rotating friction, resonating in multilayer. Quiet, low-fi sounds form groups and change the entire image of sounds. When visitors move the position of a player or replace the needle, an additional new world of sound appears. In the gallery on the second floor is a new installation, which disassembles turntable functions and hi-fi sound is output.
These installations provide people with an opportunity to reconsider the meaning, possibilities, and historical significance of sound art composed of records and turntables, which are being consigned to oblivion in the digital age.
(This work is a great renewal of the work exhibited in sendai mediatheque in 2007.)
The system has been jointly developed with YCAM InterLab.




photo: Ryuichi Maruo


Otomo Yoshihide/direction and sound composition
Yasutomo Aoyama/art direction

[Workshop members]
Yoshiko Akita, Yumi Fukano, Yutaka Hanaoka, Akiyo Hasegawa,
Makoto Hirabayashi, Eiichi Ishii, Keisuke Ishikawa, Haruka Kadowaki, Hiroko Kaku, Emiko Kasamatsu, Yoshihiro Kikuchi, Manabu Kimura, Tomoka Kinoshita, Emi Koumatsu, Keisuke Kuwamoto, Koreyuki Mitsunaga, Yasuo Nakagawa, Tatsuaki Nose, Naomi Ootomo, Saeko Oyama,
Motoko Soda, Hidetaka Sugiyama, Mayumi Tahara, Shogo Takenaga, Masanori Tamura, Tokiko Tatsuno, Naho Terashima, Mitsuru Tokisato, Mitsuya Watanabe, Kenji Yamanaka, Kanako Yamane, Tatsunori Yoshioka

[Turntable doner]
Arakaki Kazumi

[YCAM InterLab]
Takayuki Ito/system design and programming
Richi Owaki/space design
Etsuko Nishimura/turntables management
Fumie Takahara/lighting design
Soichiro Mihara/control system engineering [hi-fi version]

Chang Yung-Ta/technical support

Satoshi Hama/technical support

Sessions B: August 23 (sat.) – October 13 (mon.)
Gallery 2F

Otomo Yoshihide

What is the sound that a record player has in itself? Adopting today’s state-of-the-art technologies to the full, this work “without record player” is based on the concept of “without records,” which uses only old portable record players and has been evolved through stages. This hyper-version performs deconstruction and reconstruction in the current perspective, taking away the recorded media (records) of a record player, the origin of recording media.


photo: Ryuichi Maruo


Otomo Yoshihide / direction and sound composition

[YCAM InterLab]
Soichiro Mihara / device design and engineering
Takayuki Ito / system design, sound design and programming
Etsuko Nishimura / sound engineering
Fumie Takahara/ lighting design