Inspired by radical art movements of 20th century, Tommi’s idea was to form a band with non-musicians in search of how music could be approached differently.
group A was formed in 2012 when art student and a vocalist/bassist Tommi Tokyo met textile design graduate Sayaka Botanic and her friend Kaoru Harada. Since their first performance at gallery COMMUNE (Tokyo, JP), the project has explored the possibilities in breaking the preconceptions of live performance. The group(A) attempts to subvert the boundary between musical performance and performance art incorporating use of the body, live-painting, noise, acoustics,and poetry in their formative performances. This experiential vocabulary is onethey continue to develop through their practice in the rejection of tradition and cliché that challenges them to expand the live music experience. The dichotomous nature of absence and presence is continuously investigated in constructing the live output of the group.
Frequent collaborations with visual artists, dancers, and scenographers of different practices is one of the crucial processes in their experimentation both of sound and performance. In 2018 the duo teamed up with choreographer Christoph Winkler for their first theatre piece, "Ernest Berk The Complete Expressionist" (Berlin HAU2, CTM Festival, Berlin, 2018)in which the duo recreated one of Ernest Berk’s early tape loop percussive pieces into new primordial industrial hypnotic rhythms. In Dana Gingras’ multimedia performance piece, “anOther” (Agora de la Danse, Montreal, 2018) theband performed as mysterious figures behind a wall of old televisions, playing original scores live. Berlin based visual artist Dead Slow Ahead frequently collaborates for selected A/V performances including Roskilde Festival and Berlin Atonal, visualising a bizarre world of group A with analog macro video and 3d generative abstractions. More theatre and dance projects to come in2021.
The duo has been programmed into Le Guess Who?(NL), Donaufestival(AT), OFF Festival (PL) and Dark Mofo (AU) to name a few, and released from multiple record labels such as Mannequin Records.