Junko is the solo nome de plume for Junko Hiroshige. She is vocalist/instrumentalist and one of the founding members of the seminal Japanese Noise band Hijokaida, which in the late '70s gave rise to liminal and destructive performances. She has a voice of great intensity. Her solo vocal performances are incredibly musical and harrowing confrontations with the very real, physical and aural trauma of a woman screaming. To really get to grips with what is so affecting in being confronted with Junko’s solo performances then it helps us at least to deal with them on an emotional level, but also to try and understand how this experience forces you to think – a kind of conceptual experience – and what it might allude to. In addition to the releases with Hijokaidan, Junko has released a handful of records under her own name. These include Sleeping Beauty, a solo project that showcases Junko's voice a cappella, with no accompanying instrumentation, and collaborative albums with Mattin like Pinknoise and Tip of the Tongue, and with Michel Henritzi.
Junko
Nature
sound performance, italian première
Nature, an unamplified performance by Junko, is a unique occasion. It’s like swallowing a spider to catch a fly. A superhuman scream that embodies what Barthes calls 'significance': beyond the encrypted message, it resonates. Junko is like a white shade after Hiroshima. Her overexposed diaphanous body, her scream, miles away from the hysteria of other yellers in the noise music landscape. It is just terror, or call it beauty. She almost appears disconnected from herself, as if her voice were detached from her body, each evolving in a separate space. Her punctured tongue giving access to the unutterable and unspeakable. Dyslexic, monstrous voice, rising to inhuman high pitches, held on the threshold of auditory pain, almost endlessly. Junko’s scream recalls the phrasing of free music saxophonists, a common musical naivety devoid of academicism and technique.