Overview
(January 13, 1959 – September 25, 2013), better known by his stage name Aube, was a Japanese noise musician. He released many CDs, LPs and cassettes, and was regarded as one of the most important noise musicians of his time. He did not like to term his work "music," preferring the term "design": "I don't think of myself as a musician or an artist. I'm a designer. I therefore consider my sound works to be designs as well".
Biography
Akifumi Nakajima was born in January 1959 in Kyoto. He worked as an Industrial designer and became thoroughly interested in sound work in the 1980s. In 1993, he was asked to create music for an art installation. After that, he created an enormous body of work.
Music
The essential element of Nakajima recordings is that each record was composed with only a single material source, which was manipulated and processed using various types of electronic equipment. Examples of sources he manipulated include air, water, fluorescent lamps, voltage-controlled oscillators, voices, pulmonary sounds, the Holy Bible's pages, and steel wire. In November 1996, he performed at the Takamatsu City Museum Of Art using only telephones as source material. His 1993 album Luminous was written for an art installation by Takashi Sasaoka and Sasaoka Takashi, which used flickering fluorescent lights; the sound source for the album is fluorescent & glow lamps. He also used the sounds of the human body--the lungs, heart and blood vessels, saying "The sounds in the body, like brainwaves, the lungs, heartbeat, blood vessels, these are usually not heard very well. But I have a mysterious image of the body, and what kinds of sound are within. My albums using these body sound sources are my way of expressing my image of the body".
Many of his earliest recordings use water as a source, in either a still form or a gush, as from a faucet or a stream. Among the most well-known are Hydrophobia (1991, Vanilla, Japan), Métal De Métal (1996, Manifold, USA), Cardiac Strain (1997, Alien8 Recordings, Canada), and Set On (2001, Manifold, USA). His early work was noisier; his later work leaned toward ambient. Some of his albums are thirty minutes long; some consist of one 60-minute piece.
From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).