Yasunao Tone, an experimental composer and multimedia artist associated with the Fluxus movement who used manipulations of digital technology to turn digital technology against itself, including a 48-minute exercise in aural endurance made up of squawks and bleeps from a mangled compact disc, died on May 12 in Manhattan. He was 90.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Artists Space, a New York contemporary art nonprofit that presented a retrospective of his career in 2023.
Before moving to New York City in the early 1970s, Mr. Tone, a native of Tokyo, was a founding member of Group Ongaku, a groundbreaking free-improvisation ensemble, and of Team Random, an early computer art collective.
He became an influential figure in the Japanese wing of Fluxus, the loose-knit avant-garde movement that began in the early 1960s, whose members included John Cage, the experimental composer; Nam June Paik, the video art pioneer; and Yoko Ono, the conceptual artist. All of those artists influenced his work.
Whatever the medium, the guiding principle of Fluxus was to “promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art,” as its founder, the artist George Maciunas, once put it.
Even to his admirers, Mr. Tone’s music was essentially anti-music. (A writer and theorist as well, Mr. Tone published an influential essay, “Toward Anti-Music,” in 1961.)
“I think people will be surprised to know that the usual notion of Asian music will be totally destroyed when they listen to his music or read his scores,” Ms. Ono said in a 2013 interview with The Wall Street Journal. “He is not Asian. He is Martian.”
Mr. Tone, whose work was sometimes categorized as “glitch music,” often sought to shatter the power and precision of digital media by scrambling the orderly bytes and bits. He began to manipulate compact discs in the mid-1980s. In 1997, he released his highly regarded album “Solo for Wounded.”
To create this quintessential work of noise music, according to the culture magazine AnOther, Mr. Tone applied Scotch tape pierced with pinholes to the underside of a CD of Debussy’s “Préludes,” creating a free-form symphony of sorts out of the resulting sonic malfunctions. To the uninitiated, the sounds suggest the squawks of an old dial-up modem, or perhaps the “Star Wars” droid R2-D2 in meltdown mode.
To do so, he had to override the error-correcting system of the CD player, robbing the machine of its control. “Sometimes it proceeds backwards,” he said in an interview with the artist and composer Christian Marclay. “Or it hesitates and searches for the next signal. When the CD player stops or hesitates to advance, I tap it or slightly shake it.”
Neil Strauss of The New York Times once wrote that Mr. Tone’s “eerie sound collages,” involving “sound and how it moves in space,” are “always worth listening to.”
But his work was undoubtedly taxing. “The most fascinating things about Tone’s work,” Stacia Proefrock wrote of “Solo for Wounded” on the website AllMusic, “are the ideas behind it: his surrender of control in the music-making process and his lack of desire to communicate specific musical idioms.” The piece itself, she said, was “interesting,” but only “to a point.”
At times, Mr. Tone incorporated visual media into his work. His 2005 piece “Paramedia Centripetal” involved six discs of raw sounds, eight frequency bands and eight speakers, along with images of Japanese calligraphy projected on a screen behind him.
“The sounds themselves make no pretense of conventional beauty, drawn as they are from fractured radio conversations and music, feedback and electronic noise that noodles, vibrates and hammers,” The New York Times critic Bernard Holland wrote in a review.
“The product seems of secondary importance anyway,” Mr. Holland continued, “and may even be irrelevant. It is the process that interests us: watching Mr. Tone’s electronic pen in action and listening to the negotiations between chance and calculation that result.”
Yasunao Tone was born on March 31, 1935, in Tokyo. He attended Chiba University, where he studied Japanese literature and wrote his thesis on Dada and Surrealism. He also began to collaborate on experimental music with other students.
“Being a bit cerebral, I was initially planning to work on the theory side of things rather than actually performing,” he said in a 2013 interview with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “At some point, though, I got swept up in it and started playing music with them.”
His first instrument was the saxophone, and his self-taught approach was anything but conventional. “I tried my hardest to play without any distinct melodic line,” he said, so “it was both extremely fast and sonically diverse, with 20 to 30 different noises produced per second.”
He eventually began experimenting with various instruments from around the globe. “After a while, though, that started to bore me, too,” he added, “and I thought, ‘A musical instrument is an object, and it’s fundamentally no different from other objects.’” His subsequent sonic forays included scraping a washboard and banging on a metal barrel.
He graduated in 1957, and the next year he helped form Group Ongaku, which had a discordant sensibility that suited an era when social conventions and hierarchies in Japan were beginning to splinter in the wake of wartime devastation.
Mr. Tone fell in with the likes of Mr. Paik and Ms. Ono on their visits to Japan. (Ms. Ono is Japanese, but was living in the United States by then.) In 1963, Mr. Maciunas published the score, minimalist as it was, for Mr. Tone’s composition “Anagram for Strings,” which consisted of a loop of recorded string music by Group Ongaku wound in a plastic case and threaded through the machine’s pickup so it played indefinitely.
After moving to the United States, Mr. Tone collaborated with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the sound and visual artists Florian Hecker and Russell Haswell, and others. In 1990, he performed at the Venice Biennale.
Information about survivors was not immediately available.
The Artists Space retrospective of Mr. Tone’s work, “Region of Paramedia,” included graphic scores, manipulated sound objects and other ephemera, as well as restagings of his compositions. “Paramedia” was Mr. Tone’s way of describing the manipulation of technology to “create pieces that are simultaneously multipliable and non-repetitive,” the organization noted.
If it meant vandalizing technology, so be it. As he told Mr. Marclay, “To fight with smart machines you have to be very primitive.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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