Notice: Severely damaged sound and video on original miniDV tape.
Kapelica Gallery and Centre for Urban Culture Kino Šiška present superstar disco-noise-pop group MAYWA DENKI, featuring three human performers and an orchestra of robotized musical instruments. The performers’ rigorous corporate image mixes with wacky Japanese techno-freak-pop culture, hilarious choreography, and unexpected musical and set turnarounds, making the concert the ultimate space-manga fete for the third millennium. The development and artistic narrative of the Japanese group Maywa Denki is the work of frontman Novmichi Tosa, who, with his brother Masamichi, founded the group in 1993 on the ashes of the namesake company that had been owned by their father. He turned a midsized manufacturer of cathode-ray tubes into a company exclusively devoted to art. As Novmichi likes to say, in Japan Maywa Denki enjoys the same sort of reputation as firms such as Sony and Panasonic. T
he performers have a distinct corporate image which they accentuate by wearing blue overalls for performances. They express their unique style with terms typically used in manufacturing: they name their instruments "products" and their shows and exhibitions "product demonstrations" in which they demonstrate how to play DIY robotized instruments. In Ljubljana Maywa Denki - Novmichi Tosa, Masataka Kimura and Yosuke Oda - will perform with a medium-sized pop ensemble of robots. The concert is pointedly humorous as the performers playfully present robotics and the philosophy of cybernetics, which attempts to explain complex functions of the human body with reverse engineering of nature. According to legend, the band members had to decommission their robotic singer, whose imitation of the human voice was so unbelievably faithful that he was stealing too much attention from the frontman.
Robotics is usually perceived as alienation from humankind that intensifies the more non-anthropomorphic robots get. It appears to us that machines and mechanisms have a specific, inorganically ferrous life and we often forget that they are merely mechanised versions of the human body or its functions. In the world of Maywa Denki, the robotised instruments grow on us because they are an exceptionally effective amalgamation of the anthropomorphic and the mechanical.
Maywa Denki have won multiple awards, including the Award of Distinction in the Interactive Art category of the Prix Ars Electronica 2003 (Linz, Austria).
© Yoshimoto Kogyo Co.,Ltd. / Maywa Denki
