The second day’s schedule was from the early evening to midnight. Different from the first day, the atmosphere of the venue was more relaxed.

Chicks on Speed, Juan Atkins and Carl Craig

At the main hall, the first half was upbeat music and the latter half was a more electronic sound. The best artist in the first half was, as I thought, T.Raumschmiere. There’s not so many artists who are able to express the fusion of punk rock and electronic music in such a radical way. He showed the performance full of destructive and positive message. However, as usual, most excited person in the venue was himself.

T.Raumschmiere

The artist whom I can’t finish this report without mentioning is Human Audio Sponge who performed the very last of this festival. Human Audio Sponge consists of Haruomi Hosono, Yukihiro Takahashi and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Three of them used to work under the name of YMO, who influenced a lot in the world electronic music scene. Although many famous music group have reorganised and kept playing their traditional sound, they changed their name and sound style, exploring new style of music flexibly. In the middle of the performance, they invited Keigo Oyamada aka Cornelius, then played onetime famous music in electronica version. There were so many people in the hall that a lot of people had to give up seeing their performance. At SonarSound Lab, their performance was broadcasted live for those people. When I was watching Ryuichi Sakamoto played keyboard, Yukihiro Takahashi did drums and Haruomi Hosono did base, I imagined Egyptian pyramid which was brought back fully equipped with high technology.

What I was most surprised of in the event was that a large number of people understood and enjoyed this particular music. It was like a miraculous experience to share the music with so many people, because the music are sometimes too experimental and difficult to understand.

Sonarsound Tokyo 2004
Date: October 9th and 10th, 2004
Place: Ebisu Garden Place, Tokyo
info@sonarsound.jp
https://www.sonarsound.jp