Tot Onyx is the solo project of Tommi Tokyo, founder of Japanese duo, group A.
Formed in 2012, group A’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 to develop 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 visual artists, media artists and videographers, which is crucial to her experimentation in both sound and performance. Following groupA's collaboration with Christoph Winkler for their first theatre piece,"Ernest Berk The Complete Expressionist" (HAU2, CTM Festival, Berlin,2018) and the multimedia performance piece with Dana Gingras, “anOther” (Agorade la Danse, Montreal, 2018), 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 Butoh under the choreographer and director of the piece, Yuko Kaseki. She also spent the second half of 2021 working and finalising the score for Juri Padel’s film ‘JUNK SPACE BERLIN’, which premiered in 2022. Projects such as these lay a foot hold for Tommi’s expanding musical expression and further exploration into sound design.