Kazumasa Hashimoto (born 1974 in
Tokyo
Tokyo (; ja, 東京, , ), officially the Tokyo Metropolis ( ja, 東京都, label=none, ), is the capital and largest city of Japan. Formerly known as Edo, its metropolitan area () is the most populous in the world, with an estimated 37.468 ...
,
Japan
Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...
) is a Japanese composer,
mastering engineer
A mastering engineer is a person skilled in the practice of taking audio (typically musical content) that has been previously mixed in either the analog or digital domain as mono, stereo, or multichannel formats and preparing it for use in distr ...
and
web designer
Web design encompasses many different skills and disciplines in the production and maintenance of websites. The different areas of web design include web graphic design; user interface design (UI design); authoring, including standardised code an ...
.
As a child, Hashimoto learned classical piano, starting to compose in high school while making music on his computer. He majored in composition at
Tokyo College of Music
is a private music school in Toshima, Tokyo, Japan. It was founded as in Kanda, Tokyo, in 1907.
History
The college moved to Toshima in Tokyo in 1924 after the original campus was destroyed by the Great Kantō earthquake.
Some notable gradu ...
.
His minimalistic music is a rich blend of
electronic
Electronic may refer to:
*Electronics, the science of how to control electric energy in semiconductor
* ''Electronics'' (magazine), a defunct American trade journal
*Electronic storage, the storage of data using an electronic device
*Electronic co ...
textures and acoustic instruments such as
cello
The cello ( ; plural ''celli'' or ''cellos'') or violoncello ( ; ) is a Bow (music), bowed (sometimes pizzicato, plucked and occasionally col legno, hit) string instrument of the violin family. Its four strings are usually intonation (music), t ...
,
violin
The violin, sometimes known as a ''fiddle'', is a wooden chordophone (string instrument) in the violin family. Most violins have a hollow wooden body. It is the smallest and thus highest-pitched instrument (soprano) in the family in regular ...
and
clarinet
The clarinet is a musical instrument in the woodwind family. The instrument has a nearly cylindrical bore and a flared bell, and uses a single reed to produce sound.
Clarinets comprise a family of instruments of differing sizes and pitches ...
. Hashimoto makes extensive use of the
piano
The piano is a stringed keyboard instrument in which the strings are struck by wooden hammers that are coated with a softer material (modern hammers are covered with dense wool felt; some early pianos used leather). It is played using a keyboa ...
, as well as nonsense,
collage
Collage (, from the french: coller, "to glue" or "to stick together";) is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. ...
-like lyrics constructed from digitally edited voice
samples.
As a pianist he has collaborated with Japanese electronica artist
World's End Girlfriend
, better known by his stage name World's End Girlfriend, is a Japanese musician from Gotō Islands, Nagasaki Prefecture. He is the founder of the record label Virgin Babylon Records.
Biography
Katsuhiko Maeda was born on 1 November 1975 in Gotō ...
, world music artist Souichiro Suzuki, and singer Yukawa Shione. In 2005 he was featured on ''Childish Music'', an anthology of music compiled by
Ekkehard Ehlers
Ekkehard Ehlers (born 1974) is an artist working in the field of electronic music. In addition to his solo career, he has recorded under the monikers Auch, Betrieb and Ferdinand Fehlers and as a member of the duo Autopoesies and his band März. ...
in "an attempt to define a new genre" of "naive sounds". In 2008, Hashimoto scored the critically acclaimed film,
Tokyo Sonata
is a 2008 Japanese film directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa. It won the award for Best Film at the 3rd Asian Film Awards and received 2008 Asia Pacific Screen Awards nominations for Achievement in Directing and Best Screenplay. At the 2008 Cannes Film Fe ...
.
Discography
* ''Yupi'' (2003)
* ''Epitaph'' (2004)
* ''Gllia'' (2006)
* ''Euphoriam'' (2007)
* "Tokyo Sonata" (2008)
* ''strangeness'' (2010)
Contributions
* ''out'' (2001)
* ''warter garden'' (2003)
* ''cinema soundtrack ー間ー'' (2003)
* ''fork ends'' (2004)
* ''Childish Music'' (2005)
* ''We are all cotton hearted'' (2006)
References
External links
Kazumasa Hashimoto Official WebsiteKazumasa Hashimoto on ''Noble Label''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hashimoto, Kazumasa
1974 births
Ambient musicians
Japanese electronic musicians
Japanese male musicians
Living people
Musicians from Tokyo