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RE: [microsound] women in electronic music



>Where to I find out more info on this Tenno?

"Tenno" is the title of the LP by Noise, released on Pinacotheca in the
early 1980's.

Noise is the name for the duo, or project, of Omura Reiko and Kudo Tori,
started several years before they were married.  Reiko sang; Tori played
keyboards.  They recorded that one LP and performed live in Tokyo a number
of times, at least twice on the same night as Haino Keiji and Shiraishi
Tamio.

When we met and became friends, Reiko had been performing for several years
in an SM hotel, a private act where she'd occupy a small room and whip
herself, wearing a long, loose-fitting black leather dress she'd sewn
herself, as clients watched through a peephole in the door.  When Noise
performed, she would always wear that same dress.  Tori had been playing
solo and in a variety of bands, including a loosely organized
quasi-orchestra called A-Musik.  He contributed a refined sense of music to
Noise, Reiko brought its soul: a quiet, lonely, breathtakingly haunting
quality in her voice that never failed to turn a night otherwise full of
flailing amped-up sonic assaults into something else entirely, something
unforgettable.

In the mid-80's, soon after their child was born, Reiko and Tori became
Jehovah's Witnesses and, as often happens to new parents, went into a sort
of seclusion. At that time, just when interest in a re-release of "Tenno"
was spreading, Reiko especially felt that all the music they'd made should
be somehow taken off the face of the planet.

Fortunately Reiko and Tori have worked through that, and have started
making music again.  Since the mid-1990's they've been recording and
performing under the name -- forgive my diminishing near-term memory --
___(something)___ ___(something)___ Shabazz.  A one-page article on them
ran in The Wire in late 1999 or 2000.



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