# Remembering the Work of Experimental Innovator Yoshi Wada  ## Metadata - Author: [[Jennifer Lucy Allan]] - Full Title: Remembering the Work of Experimental Innovator Yoshi Wada - Category: #articles - Summary: insert summary - My notes: - Summary: Yoshi Wada, an experimental innovator who passed away at 77, was a musician, artist, and bagpipe player known for his minimalist art. His work with handmade bagpipes and custom-built instruments created almost visceral drones, exploring the potential of air and sound. Despite limited recordings of his work until the late '00s, his son Tashi has been reissuing his father's pieces, showcasing their uniqueness and the challenges faced in capturing live performances. Wada's unconventional approach to music, his custom instruments, and collaborations reflect his bold and innovative spirit, leaving a lasting impact on the experimental music scene. - URL: https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/yoshi-wada-discography?utm_source=footer ## LLM Chats ## NotebookLM ## LLM Audio ## Highlights > The title to this piece is a reference to Yoshi’s custom instruments. One of them was shaped like a crocodile, and had a low drone, like an elephant. The piece is 44-minutes of avant-garde bagpipe music that owed a debt to traditional ballads, and was dedicated to the clans and pipers who had died. Yoshi recorded it over three days in an empty swimming pool—where he also slept. “Whenever I moved, I woke up because of the reverberations,” he once said. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jyyej7cc7xxxk18qr9tennzq)) > Yet despite the long shadow he casts across the history of experimental music, few recordings of his works were widely available until the late ‘00s, when they were released on CD via EM Records. More recently, Yoshi’s son Tashi has been reissuing his father’s work through his own label, [Saltern](https://saltern.bandcamp.com/). Yoshi’s albums were rarely intended to be albums in the conventional sense; they were primarily a documentation of his live shows. In fact, Yoshi had to be persuaded to release anything at all. It was Tashi who convinced him his work should be available to the public. “Each of his albums is more than just a recording,” Tashi says. “It’s the culmination of a body of work that took years to develop, from the building of the instruments to the mode of improvisation and the structure of the composition, which were often informed by specific acoustic spaces. All of this is embedded in the sound you hear on the recordings. He wasn’t a fan of electronic amplification. He preferred the acoustic sounds to interact in the air itself—which maybe explains his reservations with recordings.” ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jyyed7pjym8b999w6by3v2m1))