Five lines from Tokyo, closing what Russolo opened in Milan seventy-two years earlier.
The Bureau files M·07 as the closing entry of the Manifestos department. The M-series ran from Russolo at M·01 in 1913 to Yamanouchi at M·07 in about 1985 onward, across seventy-two years, four countries (Italy, the United Kingdom, the United States in two locations, Japan), and three language groups (Italian, English, Japanese). The Bureau later added M·08 (Vomir, c. 2007) as a structurally analogous late-wave entry, extending the arc by twenty-two years; but the arc closes here, with the five lines Yamanouchi printed on inserts of the early Gerogerigegege releases through the late 1980s and on the sleeve of the 1994 Instruments Disorder (170 Songs) cassette. The form is articulated as five short declarations and that is the end of the form.
The author is Juntaro Yamanouchi (山ノ内純太郎), founder in 1985 of the Tokyo-based project The Gerogerigegege (ザ・ゲロゲリゲゲゲ). The project name is a Japanese onomatopoeic compound derived from the verbs for vomiting and diarrhoea, a position statement in the project's title rather than an aesthetic gesture. Yamanouchi ran his own label, Vis a Vis Audio Arts, on which the project's documents (records, cassettes, conceptual non-records) were issued through the period of the project's first active phase 1985–2001. The Bureau notes Yamanouchi's longstanding collaborator Gero 30 (Tetsuya Endoh, also credited as Gero 56) as the project's other continuous member, with on-stage exhibitionist gestures that the Bureau holds as documentary fact and notes here for completeness without further dwelling.
The Gerogerigegege's method ran across several modes within the same project, an editorial fact the Bureau holds as distinctive of the file. The harsh-noise mode the project is most-internationally associated with (the live performances, the 1990 Tokyo Anal Dynamite 75-track grindcore-and-noise live LP) sits alongside, on the same Vis a Vis catalogue, a Ramones-influenced punk vein (Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male), a quiet-ambient idiom (None Friendly, Endless Humiliation, >(decrescendo)), and a body of conceptual non-records: the Showa 1989 release bookending a recording of people having sex to the Japanese national anthem after Hirohito's death, the Night 7-inch consisting mainly of a recording of a man defecating into a toilet after the standard one-two-three-four count, the Shaking Box Music release consisting of one hundred blank cassettes in a metal box and the Art Is Over release the Bureau files this M·07 entry against: a cassette box with no cassette inside, containing instead a single severed octopus tentacle and a lift-out card carrying the five lines. The Bureau files the method's heterogeneity as part of the manifesto's position. The five lines apply across the catalogue. The catalogue contains a punk record, a noise record, an ambient record, an octopus tentacle and a hundred blank cassettes; the five lines say the same thing about each of them.
The text the Bureau reproduces in §03 below appears, in the Bureau's reconstruction from the available documentary record, on at least two Vis a Vis releases: the Art Is Over concept cassette itself (limited edition of 50 copies, Vis a Vis Audio Arts, undated but circulating from the late 1980s) on the lift-out card inside the cassette case and the 1994 Instruments Disorder (170 Songs) cassette on the sleeve notes. The latter is the most cited appearance of the text: Yamanouchi printed the five lines as part of the sleeve copy, alongside the recording-and-mixing dates (recorded 9 January 1994 at Hotel Ultra; mixed 16 January 1994 at Psycho Trash Centre) and the standard Vis a Vis Audio Arts sticker. The five lines also recur, with minor variations, on later Gerogerigegege releases through the late 1990s. The Bureau treats the text as a standing statement that Yamanouchi reissued whenever the occasion called for it, rather than a single dated document, and dates the manifesto's editorial manner at c. 1985 onward with the appearance on the 1994 Instruments Disorder sleeve.
The five lines themselves are reproduced in §03 below. The Bureau notes here, before the reproduction, the structural palette of the document. The text is not a manifesto in the Marinetti-Russolo-Maciunas sense; it is not an argument for a position, with premises and conclusions, articulated at length. The text is closer in form to a Fluxus event-score (compressed instructions, total in their reach, refusing the apparatus of conventional discursive argument) and to George Maciunas's three-line Fluxus Manifesto 1963 (a typed page on the document's position, with the conventional discursive apparatus stripped away) than to either of the longer manifestos at M·01 or M·03. The five lines reject, in order, composition, melody, dedication, gratitude and finally art itself. The rejection is total. The Bureau holds the rejection as articulated at the limit of what a manifesto can be while remaining a manifesto: any further compression would be silence and silence is not a manifesto.
The Bureau notes Yamanouchi's documented disappearance after the 2001 release of Saturday Night Big Cock Salaryman, the project's last release before a fifteen-year hiatus during which Yamanouchi was uncontactable and rumours of his death or institutionalisation circulated in the Japanese noise scene. On 27 August 2013 the Japanese noise figure Gidayū Kaitai (解体義太夫) posted to Twitter that Yamanouchi had been in contact; the project's first post-hiatus release, Moenai Hai (燃えない灰, "ash that will not burn"), was issued 20 April 2016 on Eskimo Records. The Bureau files the 2001–2016 hiatus as the form's own literal enactment of the manifesto's closing line: the work stopped, for fifteen years and then resumed. The Bureau does not over-read the resumption. Yamanouchi returned to making records; the five lines remained printed on the inserts of the earlier ones. The manifesto's position and the project's biography are, in the Bureau's reading, the same document.
The Bureau also notes, before closing the editorial section, the documentary-citation mode of the file. The five lines are cited at length in two academic sources: Paul Hegarty's Noise/Music: A History (Continuum, 2007, the standard English-language critical history of noise music) and David Novak's Japanoise: Music at the Edge of Circulation (Duke University Press, 2013, the standard English-language ethnomusicological study of the Japanese noise scene). The Bureau cites both works at the head of the M·07 file as the sources for the Anglophone secondary literature on the Gerogerigegege. The English-language interview corpus is thin (Yamanouchi gave few interviews during the project's first phase and the Yamanouchi interview material from the post-2016 return is in Japanese-language publications the Bureau holds at one remove). The Bureau notes the source-density limitation and files within it.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Late Pleistocene · last revised c. the Late Middle Ages