We conduct research on various fields of interest which extend from and merge in issues of performance and side effects.
We create various forms of performances, while also searching ways to frame various phenomena as performance.
We publish what we discovered, made, or conceived, through various channels and platforms across the world.
You makes music(ians), dance(rs), haunted musical mansions, nursery rhymes, and other forms of performances as a member of No Collective, and publishes experimental children’s books written by children and other literary oddities as a member of Already Not Yet.
In addition to his artistic activity, You also conducts research on various topics related to performance, and has been engaged in an extensive study of David Tudor’s music, the results of which have been recently compiled into Reminded by the Instruments: David Tudor’s Music (Oxford University Press, 2021).
You currently works as associate professor at the University of Tokyo with a joint appointment at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (Culture and Representation Course) and the Art Center of the University of Tokyo (ACUT). He is also the chair (and one of the only two members) of the Department of Avant-garde Arts which he founded in 2023.
An archeology of the occult and convenient notion of influence which people use to explain relationships and effects that cannot be explained rationally. From influentia to influencers, via influenza and DUI. [COURSE]
Learn moreA series of publications that serve as a platform for practical and theoretical research on the concept of "influence." Each issue in this series will focus on a specific theme from various perspectives through the optics of "influence."
Learn moreS.E.L.O.U.T. is curating a series of seminars focused on the topic of influence this fall. [SEMINAR]
Learn moreA genealogical examination of the now-prevalent notion of performance, with a focus on the various forms of empiricism revolving around the lineage of pragmatism. [COURSE]
Learn moreExploring personal habits as a network of unconscious choreography set on each individual, and using mutual reflection between participants to discover dance by way of subtraction. [COURSE]
Learn moreAn experimental class where non-music major students learn the real history and theory and practice of experimental music, and attempt to imagine and fabricate a pseudo-history and theory and practice of experimental music that could have been but was not. Scheduled to go on for twenty or so years. [COURSE]
COMING SOONA series of pedagogical exercises to make music that can only be performed and experienced over zoom, partially to overcome the reluctance of teaching experimental music during COVID-19. [COURSE]
Learn moreLong term collaborative project based in Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan, to explore the realizability of David Tudor's unrealized project Island Eye Island Ear along with the side effects of such an exploration.
Learn moreAn effort to publish the documentation of 9 Evenings (1966), using the manuscript of a book that was planned yet abandoned in the aftermath of the event, while also reflecting on the passing of time since then to conceive a documentation twice removed.
Learn moreYou Nakai is currently working on a translation of Investigative Aesthetics by Eyal Weizman and Matthew Fuller, as well as other publications related to Forensic Architecture.
Learn moreVarious projects concerning David Tudor are in development, including a festival of Tudor's music in Berlin (July 2022), plans for setting a David Tudor Lab in Istanbul, etc.
Learn moreExtending the idea of bias in analog electronics to make a circuit function properly, materials for realizing a performance are theorized from the negative standpoint of constraint.
Learn moreThis is a book on what a musician named David Tudor did, along with how and why he did them. And it is also sometimes about what he might have been thinking when he did certain things. The way I go about doing this is by connecting many materials that Tudor left behind as if they were pieces of a giant puzzle. So the important thing is that whole picture emerges from within that process, as a by-product or a side effect almost, and that’s why it feels like a bit of a cheat to give away a quick overview to people who have not read it. The most exciting things, at least as far as I’m concerned, are in the specific processes of solving one puzzle after another, and not so much in the philosophy or theory that might show up in the end. In that sense, maybe it’s a bit like a performance, which might be quite fitting for a book on Tudor.
I wrote a new essay titled “Sounding the Peripheries” for the catalog of the exhibition Teasing Chaos: David Tudor at the Museum der Moderne Salzburg. Through a detailed analysis of Soundings: Ocean Diary (1994), Tudor’s contribution to Ocean, his last collaborative project with John Cage and Merce Cunningham, the essay probes into one particular topic which I had deliberately left on the periphery of my argument in Reminded by the Instruments: the personal and artistic relationship between Tudor and Cage. Tudor’s idiosyncratic take on Cage’s approach to music is revealed, and a series of puzzling evidence documenting their long-time friendship is presented for others to solve.
The first concert of zoomusic by my students at the University of Tokyo.
In December 1969, David Tudor made a series of recordings at the Electronic Music Studio at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India, using Moog Synthesizers that he himself had brought from the United States and installed there. Ten years later, on March 1, 1979, Tudor used one of these recordings, which he now called Monobird, as the primary source track for a recording session at the New York discotheque Xenon.
This album, released by TOPOS, includes two 33rpm vinyl records of these works and an essay by You Nakai, When David Tudor Went Disco, that provides an in-depth study of Tudor’s performance at Xenon and its relation to Monobird.
Selected as BEST OF 2021 by soundohm
I presented a talk as part of the Archives Public Programs of National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, India. The series examines the activities of Experiments in Art & Technology in India in the 1960s and 70s.
My session focused on one particular recording David Tudor made during his stay at NID in late 1969 using the Moog Synthesizer he had installed in India’s first electronic music studio. Although Tudor personally disliked the Moog, after circumstances pushed him to perform with the instrument, he recorded what he did and subsequently used the same recording as a sound source in various performances across the 1970s. Analysis of recordings, photographs, diagrams, schematics, and recollections, revealed the unexpected trajectory of this recording he called Monobird, offering a thought or two about putting the archive to good use.
I wrote a new essay for the recent issue of the online journal ECHO, dedicated to the topic of feedback. It traces David Tudor’s use of feedback in relatively broad strokes, especially in relation to his collaboration with Gordon Mumma, focusing on the period between Bandoneon ! and Island Eye Island Ear, and connecting the argument to my own works with No Collective.
The second concert of zoomusic by my students at the University of Tokyo
We had our first launch-up conference of Side Project on February 13, 2022. I gave a talk on Island Eye Island Ear. Unfortunately, the whole thing was in Japanese due to budget constraints, but here's a video if you want to try.
I was invited to discuss Reminded by the Instruments by RISME, a study group on electronic music within the Italian Musicological Society. I mostly answered questions and talked about things I wrote about and things I did not.
A chapter I wrote on "Material Bias" is included in the anthology
Material Cultures of Music Notation: New Perspectives on Musical Inscription
published from Routledge.
Two lengthy and very insightful reviews of Reminded by the Instruments have appeared recently.
One was written by Ezra J. Teboul in English and is published in the Computer Music Journal (MIT Press);
The other was written by Jozef Cseres in Czech and is published in the online journal His Voice (Part I and II).
The final ZOOMUSIC concert performed in collaboration with Tokyo Gen'On Project, presented online and offline simultaneously, with new pieces by composers including Doug G. Barrett, Jenn Kirby and Varun Kishore.
Online lecture given by You Nakai as part of the CTM Festival in Berlin, surveying David Tudor’s long relationship to India, which culminated in his 1969 visit to Ahmedabad to establish the electronic music studio at the National Institute of Design, but was preceded by a strange history of exchanges and misunderstandings between Western mysticism and India, as well as succeeded by an equally strange history of consequences and byproducts that, among other things, might explain why You was summoned to give this talk at CTM Festival.
I wrote a new essay for the recent issue of the online journal METODE which reflects on the multi-year endeavor to realize David Tudor's unfinished project Island Eye Island Ear, originally conceived fifty years ago. The article is composed as an assemblage of seven stories, each of which, due to their relative coherence, could be regarded as islands of narrative, thus forming together a virtual archipelago.
You Nakai gave a keynote lecture at the Speculative Sound Synthesis Symposium held at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics, University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, Austria. The abstract read as follows:
Once upon a time, in the not-so-distant land of experimental music, lived a wizard named David Tudor, who spent his life conjuring sounds out of chaos. One of his last great adventures involved a quirky, custom-built synthesizer equipped with a neural network chip——a bit like giving a drum machine a brain, but one that kept interrupting with, “Actually, I think this beat could use a little more structure.”
Tudor, who had spent his career surfing the waves of musical unpredictability, suddenly found himself in a showdown with this overachieving machine, which was obsessed with finding patterns where Tudor preferred glorious, unhinged randomness. The result? A wild series of performances called Neural Synthesis, where man and machine waged a battle of wills.
Now, as I “restage” this story for you (for the second time, actually), I’ll explore not just what happened, but how revisiting these kinds of weird, wonderful moments can mess with our understanding of the present. After all, who says technology gets the last word in creativity? Maybe, just maybe, the best way to expand our thinking about sound synthesis is to embrace the fact that even the most advanced machine can’t predict the delightful absurdity of human creativity.