Geinoh Yamashiro-gumi

Geinoh Yamashiro-gumi (芸能山城組) is a Japanese musical collective founded on January 19, 1974 by Shoji Yamashiro. Built around hundreds of participants from many walks of life—journalists, doctors, engineers, students, businessmen, and others—the group became known for combining traditional music with high technology in a way that is both ambitious and highly distinctive. Its early albums already showed a wide international reach. Chi no Hibiki (Echoes of the Earth Sing East Europe) incorporated Bulgarian and other eastern European singing styles, while Africa Genjoh (The African Vision Singing) explored African stylised chanting. Osore-zan - Dounokenbai pushed in a different direction, adding a more psychedelic flavor, Krautrock influences, and the introduction of guitar work. The group’s breakthrough came in the 1980s, when MIDI digital synthesizers could not handle the tuning systems of traditional gamelan music. Rather than abandoning the project, the collective started from scratch and taught themselves how to program and modify their equipment. The result was Ecophony Rinne (1986), the first Geinoh Yamashiro-gumi album to incorporate computer generated sounds, and the opening chapter of the trilogy. That success brought them to the attention of Katsuhiro Otomo, who commissioned the soundtrack of Akira, the work for which they are best known. Ecophony Gaia, released in 1990, completed the trilogy as its third album, with Ecophony Rinne (1986) and AKIRA (1990) serving as the first and second entries. Across their career, Geinoh Yamashiro-gumi has faithfully and accurately reproduced over eighty different styles of traditional music and performances from around the world, and despite international performances and critical acclaim, they remain relatively unknown.