Ryosuke Kiyasu is one of the most physically committed drummers in contemporary noise, and the Bureau files him at Tier II as a major practitioner and connector rather than a founder of the form. The case rests on two things that rarely sit together: a seat in Keiji Haino's Fushitsusha, which places him inside the central Japanese psychedelic-noise lineage, and a solo snare-drum practice so extreme and so widely seen that it carried his name well beyond the underground. He passes the tradition-internal centrality test through the bands he belongs to, and documentary presence through a catalogue and a body of performance too large and too distinct to leave unfiled.
The start was in Canada, not Japan. Kiyasu began as a snare-drum player there in 2003 and co-founded The Endless Blockade, a hardcore and powerviolence unit, before his work folded back into the Tokyo scene. Around 2004 he formed Sete Star Sept, switching from vocals to drums about a year later, and the duo, completed by Kae Takahashi, became his main vehicle: a heavily touring international act whose blast-speed attack the press calls noisecore, though the band itself prefers to call the music extreme noise and keeps a clear distance from grindcore as a genre. The distinction matters to them, and the Bureau records it as the band states it.
The Fushitsusha connection is the one that places Kiyasu at the centre of the tradition this archive documents. Since 2012 he has been the drummer in Keiji Haino's long-running group, a later line-up than the 1990s trio with Yasushi Ozawa and Jun Kosugi that the Bureau files on the Fushitsusha page. To hold that seat is to sit directly behind the most singular figure in Japanese psychedelic noise, and it is a large part of why Kiyasu reads as a connector: he threads the contemporary noise underground back to its founding-generation centre.
The solo work is what most people have actually seen. Kiyasu performs with a single snare drum and a small table, and the performance is as much physical as musical: he strikes the drum, his own sticks and his own face and body, building a volatile, polarising set that some receive as high art and others find close to an affront to the idea of music. It divides rooms by design. The 2023 record Dig Up Roots, on Notice Recordings, documents the snare practice in the studio, and stands as the clearest recorded statement of a method better known from the stage.
The reach came suddenly. A snare-drum solo set filmed on the street in Berlin in 2018 circulated to tens of millions of views and was picked up by the BBC and VICE, and later notices in the fashion magazine i-D and an appearance at the Edinburgh Art Festival pushed the work into the art and fashion worlds. It is rare for a practice this severe to travel that far, and the Bureau notes the crossover without mistaking it for the centre of the work, which remains the drumming itself.
The Bureau's reading. Ryosuke Kiyasu is filed at Tier II as a major contemporary noise drummer and a connector to the founding generation. The Fushitsusha seat gives the tradition-internal centrality, Sete Star Sept and the Kiyasu Orchestra give the band record across noisecore and free improvisation, and the solo snare practice gives a performance language entirely his own. He is filed as a present-day figure through whom the contemporary scene routes back to its centre, not as one of the originators, and the open question of where his work finally settles is left to the work, which continues.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Anthropocene · last revised c. the Anthropocene