Tokyo Noise

Mayuko Hino of C.C.C.C. and Tokyo, the city of noise – on film.

Tokyo Noise is a feverish city symphony about noise, beauty and a city that refuses to stand still. At the same time, it offers an introduction to Japanoise, the Japanese noise scene of which Merzbow has been one of the most important exponents. The film will be screened immediately before Merzbow’s concert at MUNCH.

Through Tokyo’s legendary noise music scene, the film paints a portrait of the Japanese metropolis. Tokyo is shown as a place of extremes and contradictions, where extreme density, technology, commercial sound, love hotels and sensory excess exist side by side with strong traditions of silence, restraint, ritual and meditative calm.

Among those we meet is Mayuko Hino of C.C.C.C., one of the groups that, alongside Merzbow, turned Japanese noise into an international phenomenon. Hino is one of the voices that carry the film, together with a Shinto priest, a robot designer and photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, known for his controversial images of Tokyo, intimacy and kinbaku, the Japanese tradition of artistic bondage.

Overload, distortion, physical intensity and violence become aesthetic materials. In this tension between an appreciation of silence and restraint and the city’s sensory overload, noise music becomes not merely a revolt against ideals of beauty, but an exploration of what beauty can be.

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• Tokyo Noise belongs to the tradition of city symphonies – films that portray a city through rhythm, sound and movement, from Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (1927) onwards. The film won a Guldbagge, Sweden’s national film award, for Best Music.
• Japanoise is the term used for the Japanese noise scene, which gained major international significance from the 1980s onwards. Key figures include Merzbow, Hijokaidan, Incapacitants, Masonna and C.C.C.C.
• The screening is presented in collaboration with MIRAGE – Home for the Art of Cinema, a film festival and year-round initiative dedicated to promoting film as an art form. At MIRAGE, film is a collective social experience intended to surprise, challenge and fascinate.
• Tokyo Noise is part of Ultima’s focus on noise in this year’s programme. Merzbow performs at MUNCH later the same evening, while throughout the festival you can hear more noise noise in Lasse Marhaug’s 24-hour Trash This Temple, with dance in Mot harde flater, and several of the concerts in Ultima Thule. The Closest Possible Sound.