January 2010
Intermediate to advanced
176 pages
7h 54m
English
The Maywa Denki collective makes instruments of mass Whimsy.
Nobumichi Tosa stares straight into my camcorder. He presses a button on the small rectangular switchboard on his chest. The wings strapped to his body start to slowly rise. He pauses, expressionless. He raises his arms.
Then, with a snap of his fingers, he launches into an upbeat, 20-second musical performance triggered by the beat of his snapping. Every snap makes mallets at the end of his wings drum on a pair of temple blocks. It sounds like a mashup between a Buddhist funeral and a trance party.
Tosa is the president of Maywa Denki, a Tokyo-based art collective whose quirky instruments have made waves among musically inclined geeks and artists ...