Tot Onyx is the solo alias of Tommi Tokyo, a Tokyo-born and Berlin-based soundartist and performer who loves to work with metal objects and her body. She is one half of Japanese experimental performance duo, group A.
Formed in 2012, her former band's exploration into breaking the preconceptions of live performance, by incorporating use of the body, live-painting, noise and poetry was met with great enthusiasm and excitement from small art spaces to established festivals such as Berlin’s Atonal. Adept at bending expectations, both live and recorded, the band’s formative early work echoes the experiential vocabulary in which Tommi continues todevelop today. A practice in the rejection of tradition and cliché, which in Greil Marcus's words, "share the principles of negation, rebellion, destruction and détournement”.
Tommi's foundation in graphic design and photography is expressed through frequent collaborations with multi-media artists and videographers, which is crucial toher experimentation in both sound and performance. Following group A'scollaboration with dance companies such as Christoph Winkler and Dana Gingras'Animals of Distinction, Tommi continues her solo work with a focus on such creative performance. In 2021 she composed and performed on the theatre piece Das Beuys (Theater Thikwa, Berlin) which was the result of her study of dance under Butoh dancer Yuko Kaseki. Since then, the two have collaborated frequently, with the highlight being the four-day performative exhibition Universal Metabolism during Berlin Atonal in 2023. She also scored numbers of video productions including Juri Padel’s feature film JUNK SPACE BERLIN and a Tokyo-based fashion label KIDLL's SS23 collection. Projects such as these lay a foothold for Tommi’s expanding musical expression and further exploration into sound design.
2 years after dropping her first full-length album Senno I on iDEAL Recordings in 2022 which was described by Boomkat as "an illusory marvel made up of snatched half-heard voices, ritualistic rhythms, digi-fucked power electronics and emetic sci-fi drones", Tommi's second album Satire of Desire is out on Brussels' Antibody label.