"When I was around five years old in Kyoto, Japan, I followed my mother to our family’s Zen temple, where we listened to monks chanting. The chanting lasted a long time and became quite hypnotic. I almost fell asleep. These rituals were some of the first music I heard.

"In 1972, I began studying with the great Indian master Pandit Pran Nath. His improvised style of singing was an important influence on me. I would take lessons from him when he stayed at La Monte Young’s studio on Church Street. I went once a week or when I could afford it. During these sessions, I learned to follow his singing with precise intonation. It was a difficult task but gradually I got into it with practice. I would get up around 5am and sing with tambura for at least one hour. After that I went to work. My lessons with Panditji were the best studies in music I had during my life. I realized singing is one of the most difficult ways of making music, more than playing most musical instruments.

"In the mid-70s, I went to the Ethnic Music Festival in Queens, NYC, where I heard all types of ethnic music. There was some Macedonian women’s singing that was outstanding. They created fine tolerance in pitch by singing the same pitches together. This inspired me to try similar things out with male voices.

"I started to develop group singing around 1976. After doing solo singing for a while, I noticed it was also interesting to sing with other people. I already knew Richard Hayman. He was running an artists’ bar called Ear Inn. I came across Imani Smith at a Sufi center in Manhattan. He was a Sufi follower and sang well. I wasn’t into Sufism but I was curious about their singing. I organized the male choir around modal improvisations from my solo singing. The interaction between the three voices singing closely in tune produced very clear microtonal partials. I later used this method in my pieces for bagpipes.

"Singing in Unison was performed and recorded at The Kitchen, located in SoHo on Broome Street. It was a huge space with a lot of traffic noise. It’s been a long time but I still hear value in this work. Singing in Unison isn’t about New Age or avant-garde, it has to do with what we can communicate without words."

—Yoshi Wada


"Another stunning archival unearthing in this necessary series of historical recordings from Japanese drone/minimalist Yoshi Wada: Singing In Unison is a historically potent recording from a performance at The Kitchen Center, NY, on March 15, 1978 with Wada, Richard Hayman and Imani Smith using massively droning amplified and unaccompanied vocal chants to generate brain-massaging microtonal partials. The space was subject to heavy traffic noise, which comes through on the recording to great effect, with distant industrial sounds somehow falling into place in the background like the city itself has taken voice. Wada had studied singing with Pandit Pran Nath in the early 70s, when he was staying at LaMonte Young’s, and the music takes off on Nath, Young and Zazeela’s zoned tongue ascensions but w/a heady polyphonic/devotional feel that owes as much to early European religious music as it does to raga forms or even the Gyuto Monks. The trio pick out simple ascending and descending melodies, while moving parallel and just out of synch with each other in order to create areas of flux where the voices give birth to all kinds of sonic spectra. In many ways Singing In Unison comes over as a sort of ‘unplugged’ take on Wada’s pieces for invented bagpipes, locating his practice back in very dawn of the combinatory potential of music and language. This is a stunning recording, one that unites avant garde, psychedelic and folk-primitive techniques to dazzling effect, a form of ancient holy music set to levitate the future. Another massive side from Wada, beautifully presented with a fold-out insert featuring English and Japanese liners from Wada himself, very highly recommended!" —Volcanic Tongue