FPE Records Archives - Chicago Reader

A collage of Da Wei Wang holding an electric guitar and silhouetted by a light behind his head (on the left) and six tiled color-processed images of Tatsu Aoki with a shamisen, mostly in purples, pinks and blues (on the right)

Tatsu Aoki and Da Wei Wang team up for a double album of ecstatic ambience

by J.R. Nelson and Leor Galil November 1, 2022November 1, 2022

For a couple months now, Gossip Wolf has been revisiting Yes Strings Attached, the new duo album from bassist and shamisen player Tatsu Aoki and guitarist Da Wei Wang. Aoki is also a filmmaker, composer, and founder of the Chicago Asian American Jazz Festival; Wang makes experimental solo music and adds his beguiling stylings to […]

Music

The Best of the Miyumi Project celebrates 20 years of Tatsu Aoki’s culture-combining ensemble

by Bill Meyer December 22, 2020August 18, 2021

Tatsu Aoki left his native Tokyo in 1977 to study experimental film and settled in Chicago two years later. In addition to making films, he improvises, composes, and conducts music, playing bass, shamisen, and taiko drums, and by the early 1990s he’d connected with the local jazz scene, developing a particular affinity with past and […]

Music

Nicole Mitchell and Lisa E. Harris explore soulful Afrofuturist visions on EarthSeed

by Steve Krakow July 11, 2020August 18, 2021

A friend in Houston recently described multidisciplinary artist and space goddess Lisa E. Harris as a “force of nature” in the Texas scene and beyond. Upon investigation, I had to concur. Harris channels the Afrofuturism of Sun Ra, the transcendent devotionals of Alice Coltrane, and the deep-listening experiments of Pauline Oliveros—all while maintaining her own […]