Otomo Yoshihide: The Multiple Otomo Project

The Multiple Otomo DVD provides a dizzying compliment to Otomo’s music, full of jittery images both real and manipulated, flashes of visual white noise, strobe-like quick cuts, multiple split screens and extreme close ups that put the instruments Otomo is using into a new visual context. The 30 segments feature improvisations on turntable and guitar complimented by the imaginative video work of Masako Tanaka, Michelle Silva, and Tim Digulla.
“Vinyls” has Otomo taking scratching to an extreme level, using recorded music to destroy our notions of what music should be.
On “Plucks” Otomo plays rubber bands stretched and anchored to turntable knobs, tone arms and spindles, using LPs as mallets and caressing the rubber bands with a violin bow; the music is pensive and playful. “Frets” showcase Otomo’s guitar skills in stark black and white video. The piece is full of clanging feedback and rhythmic noise producing what may be the ultimate metal guitar workout. “Tone Generator” is an oscillator solo that moves from gritty feedback to smooth pulsing sine waves accompanied by acid washed video effects.
The program ends with two calming interludes: “Blue Feedback” is a combination of gentle thrumming feedback and throbbing abstract color, while “Turntable Graveyard” is a slow, meditative eulogy for the machinery Otomo has destroyed in his performances. Staccato strings or perhaps plucked rubber bands supply a funereal soundtrack while the camera pans over the ruins of records and turntables suggesting battlefields and graveyards". (Asphodel hype)

"Japanese multi-artist Otomo Yoshihide has been a central figure in Japan'e experimental music scene since the days of Ground Zero, the super-band that single-handedly reinvented avant-rock and made Zorn's Naked City sound like a bunch of well-behaved jazz musicians with an attitude problem. Since the band's demise, Otomo has become, together with Christian Marclay and Martin Tétrteault, one of the main forces behind the introduction of the turntable and the record as musical instruments per se, to be explored in all its aural possibilities just like any other sound medium. The Multiple Otomo project offers us a rare visual glimpse into some of Otomo's most extreme techniques, presenting an unique portrait of one of the most important creative musicians in the past 20 years". (Red Rum Reviews)