Masaya Nakahara's Tokyo project, founded 1987: sarcastic, collage-driven noise that set harsh sound beside found music and nursery rhymes, a first-wave Japanoise act later continued as Hair Stylistics.
Violent Onsen Geisha is the noise and sound-collage project of Masaya Nakahara, born in Tokyo in 1970, and the Bureau files it at Tier II as a major act of the first international wave of Japanese noise and the clearest example of its sarcastic, collage-driven wing. Founded in 1987, it was the first and best-known of Nakahara's many guises; he retired the name in 1997 in favour of Hair Stylistics.
What set the project apart from its peers was humour. The name translates roughly as 'violent hot-springs geisha', a confrontational joke, and the work itself is bizarre, sarcastic and mischievous where much Japanese noise was austere. The method is collage rather than pure noise: harsh sound and feedback set beside found music, field recordings, disco, hip-hop and nursery rhymes, a high-and-low appropriative mix indebted to Dada collage, Fluxus auto-destruction and No Wave squalor.
Nakahara also wrapped the project in fiction. For years he maintained an invented publicity story, repeated as fact in the Japanese press, about former members of the supposed group; it was one of several deliberate conceits around his public persona. The Bureau records this as a fabricated fiction rather than a history.
The project reached well beyond the noise underground. Nakahara toured the United States in 1995 and drew the interest of Sonic Youth and Beck, and his album Que Sera, Sera crossed into the Shibuya-kei pop world, earning the half-joking tag 'Death Shibuya-kei'. Outside music he became a respected novelist and film critic, the noise project only one facet of a fuller career.
The Bureau files Violent Onsen Geisha at Artists · Tier II as a first-wave Japanoise act of the collage strain: the sarcastic, magpie alternative to the harsh wall, and proof that Japanese noise contained a wit as sharp as its volume.