It has been 91 years since Luigi Russolo published his manifesto "The Art of Noises," in which the Italian Futurist implored, "We must break out of this narrow circle of pure musical sounds and conquer the infinite variety of noise sounds."
Answering Russolo's battle cry, countless creative souls have howled, shrieked, smashed and crashed their way into the annals of modern noise art. There have been times when the distinction between artist and musician was difficult to draw. For example, Yoko Ono and Laurie Anderson, who were working as avant-garde sound and performance artists where their primary focus was neither rhythm nor melody nevertheless both garnered commercial radio airtime.
For other artists, without aiming to be musicians at all, the act of performance itself engendered successful noise or sound art -- the Blue Man Group started out as an art collective before producing their recent hit CDs. Japan's most amazing noise-makers are Maywa Denki, referred to in their own press releases as both a company and an art unit. Maywa Denki was established in 1993 by "parallel-world electricians" Masamichi and Nobumichi Tosa, a couple of brothers who are the subject of a retrospective, "The Nonsense Machines," which features hundreds of their low-tech, sci-fi creations. The exhibition is now showing at the InterCommunication Center Gallery (ICC) in Nishi Shinjuku.