Ryuichi Sakamoto was a Japanese composer, pianist, record producer, and actor who pursued a diverse range of styles as a solo artist and as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO). With his bandmates Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, Sakamoto influenced and pioneered a number of electronic music genres.
Mego was an experimental electronic music independent record label based in Vienna, Austria. The label has been superseded by a new company, Editions Mego, which was set up both to keep Mego albums in print and to issue new albums, run by Peter Rehberg a.k.a. Pita.
David Sylvian is an English musician, singer and songwriter who came to prominence in the late 1970s as frontman and principal songwriter of the band Japan. The band's androgynous look and increasingly electronic sound made them an important influence on the UK's early-1980s new wave scene.
async is the nineteenth solo studio album of Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto and his first one in eight years since Out of Noise (2009). It is also his first full-length solo record since recovering from throat cancer in 2015. Consisting of a combination of bizarre interpretations of familiar musical instruments, unusual textures both acoustic and electronically-made, samples of recordings of people such as David Sylvian and Paul Bowles doing readings, and everyday sounds borrowed from field recordings of city streets, async has underlying themes of the worries of the end of life and the interaction of differing viewpoints in humanity.
Haruomi Hosono, sometimes credited as Harry Hosono, is a Japanese musician, singer, songwriter and record producer. He is considered to be one of the most influential musicians in Japanese pop music history, credited with shaping the sound of Japanese pop for decades as well as pop music outside of Japan. He also inspired genres such as city pop and Shibuya-kei, and as the leader of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, contributed to the development and pioneering of numerous electronic genres.
Fenn O'Berg was an improvisational computer music trio made up of members Christian Fennesz, Peter Rehberg and Jim O'Rourke. Their existence began with a surprise appearance at the Nickelsdorf Festival in 1997. This was followed by extensive international touring in 1998–99, bringing a live stage setup consisting solely of portable computing devices to venues which would not usually have booked such shows at that time.
Peter Rehberg, also known as Pita, was a British-Austrian composer of electronic audio works. He was the head of Editions Mego, which he founded in 2006 as a successor to Mego.
Oren Ambarchi is an Australian musician. He is a multi-instrumentalist who plays mainly electric guitar and percussion.
Christopher Willits is a San Francisco-based guitarist, electronic music composer and producer, visual artist and scholar. His music is electroacoustic in nature, in that both analogue and digital sounds are meshed into one singular sound.
Bruce Clifford Gilbert is an English musician. One of the founding members of the influential and experimental art punk band Wire, he branched out into electronic music, performance art, music production, and DJing during the band's extended periods of inactivity. He left Wire in 2004, and has since been focusing on solo work and collaborations with visual artists and fellow experimental musicians.
Mark Van Hoen is an English electronic music artist. He has created music under his own name as well as Locust, and Autocreation. Pitchfork said, "Musically, Van Hoen belongs to a distinguished family tree. Originally influenced by the likes of Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream, and later presaging both Autechre's glitch and Boards of Canada's pastoral IDM, with his latest album Van Hoen would fit in just as well alongside White Rainbow or Atlas Sound on a current label like Kranky: He combines oceanic drone with pop lyricism, using technology as a catalyst."
Sala Santa Cecilia is the first collaborative release between Christian Fennesz and Ryuichi Sakamoto. It was recorded live on 28 November 2004 and released 5 July 2005 by Touch. Claudia Engelhart was responsible for recording this at the Auditorium della Parco Musica for the Romaeuropa Festival.
Endless Summer is an album by Austrian electronic music producer and guitarist Fennesz, released on 3 July 2001 by Mego. The title was derived from the 1960s surf documentary by Bruce Brown, and is also shared with a 1974 compilation album by the Beach Boys. The album features Fennesz's melodic guitar run through digital processing and glitch textures.
Shadows of the Sun is the seventh studio album by the Norwegian experimental electronica band Ulver. Produced by Ulver, the album was issued in October 2007 via Jester Records and The End Records. Officially announced on 13 July 2007, Shadows of the Sun received critical acclaim on release, and was described as "dark and tragic", with "soothing electronics and natural percussion". The album features contributions from Pamelia Kurstin on theremin, Mathias Eick on trumpet, and Austrian white noise musician Christian Fennesz adding electronics and helping Ulver to correspond with their vision on the final product.
Rafael Anton Irisarri is an American composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer and mastering engineer based in New York. He is predominantly associated with post-minimalist, drone and electronic music. Irisarri is also known for being the main member of electronic music/shoegaze act The Sight Below, and signed to American label Ghostly International.
Stefan Goldmann is a German-Bulgarian DJ and composer of electronic music. His work has been described as intelligent minimal techno.
Sōtaisei Riron is a Japanese rock band formed in Tokyo in September 2006.
Etsuko Yakushimaru is a Japanese singer, producer, composer, lyricist, arranger and artist. She is broadly active, from pop music to experimental music and art. Her output has also included drawing, installation art, media art, poetry and other literature, and recitation. She also produces numerous projects and for artists, including her band, Sōtaisei Riron. Along with appearing in the Oricon charts with several hit songs, she has also created a project that involved the use of satellite, biological data and biotechnology, a song-generating robot powered by artificial intelligence and her own voice, an independently-developed VR system, and original electronic musical instruments. Major recent activities include exhibitions at Mori Art Museum, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, KENPOKU ART 2016, and Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM]. Her Tensei Jingle and Flying Tentacles albums, both released in 2016, received praise from figures including Ryuichi Sakamoto, Jeff Mills, Fennesz, Penguin Cafe, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Toh EnJoe. She is known for her solo works including theme songs in several anime series, such as The Tatami Galaxy, Arakawa Under The Bridge, Space Dandy, Sailor Moon Crystal, Hi Score Girl, Eureka Seven and Mawaru Penguindrum. As well as being the lead vocal of the rock band Sōtaisei Riron, she also works as a contemporary artist, illustrator and narrator. She also goes by the alias of Tica α (ティカ・α) when credited for lyrics and composing. In 2017 she won the STARTS Prize for Artistic Exploration for converting her pop song I’m Humanity into DNA.
Async – Remodels is an album of "reconstructions" of tracks from Japanese producer Ryuichi Sakamoto's nineteenth solo studio album async (2017). The album includes eleven reworks by producers such as Jóhann Jóhannsson, Fennesz, Cornelius, Oneohtrix Point Never, Electric Youth, and Arca. Released in Japan in December 2017 by Commmons and in February 2018 in other countries by Milan Records, Async – Remodels garnered generally positive critical reviews and peaked at number 15 on the Billboard American Top Classical Albums chart.
Sleepwalkers is a compilation album by David Sylvian, released September 2010 by Samadhi Sound.
