Toshimaru Nakamura

Toshimaru Nakamura played guitar through the 1990s in rock bands touching on improvisation and jazz before, in 1998, abandoning the instrument entirely for a technique of his own devising: routing a mixing board’s outputs back into its own inputs and controlling the resulting feedback with its knobs and faders, which he named the “no-input mixing board.” The instrument made him a central figure of onkyo, the minimalist, silence-based Japanese improvised-music scene that emerged in Tokyo in the late 1990s. His first solo album, No-Input Mixing Board (2000), was followed by a long-running duo partnership with Keith Rowe begun on Weather Sky (2001), the first of five records the two made together for Erstwhile Records.