The other day I decided I wanted to try translating something, ended up on the Asashi Shimbun webpage, and decided to translate a review based solely on the title of the work being reviewed. I ended up doing 斉藤環's review of 中原昌也's autobiography, 死んでも何も残さない. Nakahara Masaya is a fairly popular guy, it seems. The review mentions one of his (many) projects, "Violent Onsen Geisha," which is referred to as a ノイズユニット. Noise unit? I didn't find a definition online, but looking through my handy dandy notebook Google search, I eventually decided I'd be probably mostly correct in thinking ノイズユニットmeant noise. And by noise I mean noise music. If you are more knowledgeable than me, have heard of noise music, and like it, you may find this blog interesting, if you haven't found it already. You won't find Nakahara's personal site, though, due to his apparent distrust of the internets.
Anyway, the nearest brush I've ever had with 'noise' is maybe The Mars Volta (yes, I like them, leave me alone!) and I don't think they'd really be considered noise even if they have long passages of what I would call noise. So I wondered what the nature of Nakahara's noise music was. Also the name is pretty awesome. There is an array of his music on youtube. A couple of the songs I've heard from the album "Nation of Rhythm Slaves" use found music, but you can find all kinds of genres, it seems, in noise.
There is also a music video!
Violent Onsen Geisha appears to be operating under the name Hair Stylistics, now.
There were aspects of the review other than ノイズユニットthat I had some trouble translating, so I'll probably be looking a bit more at those later.
