A talk with Shinro Ohtake of JUKE/19, Puzzle Punks

Monday, October 18, 2010



A couple of weeks ago I sat down with experimental musician and mixed-media artist Shinro Ohtake. Ohtake, now 55 years old, is known for his epic body of work (his retrospective at the new national museum a couple of years of ago occupied the entire museum; the first artist to do so). We conversed about the atmosphere of the music "scene" around the time which JUKE/19 came together as well as how they scrapped together the resources for a recording, which Ikeezumi (of PSF) got behind early and released. Nice how that ties together. Ohtake went into some more details of how he first met a younger Yamataka EYE and formed Puzzle Punks. Ohtake's influence on a then somewhat impressionable EYE is measurable- both in his artwork and later musical activities. Aside from great stories, Ohtake's comments on EYE as well as the Japanese avant garde music "scene" at large were fascinating additions.



Posted by Vicente Gutierrez at 2:26 PM