Horror, especially zombie movies, is one of the genres most popular with independent filmmakers on a tight budget. In general consciousness, certain sonorities of electronic and experimental music have also become inextricably tied to the horror genre. It is interesting that both DIY movie-makers and musicians striving to be independent, find themselves often engaging with the “gruesome end” of the aesthetic spectrum. On first examination of this coincidence one might conclude that poverty can lead to a fascination with the morbid. The biography of Edgar Allan Poe could be employed to testify to such claims. Robotic musical instruments replace the specialized labor of human performers, reducing the costs of rehearsals, while turning the composer into a self-taught engineer with Frankenstein-like features. Taro Yasuno is a Japanese composer who has written music for robotic recorder flutes dubbed Duet of the Living Dead which he constructed himself out of cheap materials. An air compressor drives a “soprano zombie” and an “alto zombie” while a midi sequencer controls an array of artificial silicon fingers actuated by solenoids and rubber bands. The atonal music combines undertones of pop-voodoo with the enriched spectrum of extended instrumental techniques. Taro Yasuno has dubbed this music “barely able to maintain its musical organ, played by another will than originally intended”. His musical performances are accompanied by self-made zombie movies that appear to have been filmed in a home recording studio. Yasuno states that the movies and the music are centered on the theme of the “energy of death” that is acquired by zombies when eating human flesh and which his zombie instruments consume in the form of electrical energy derived from the depletion of fossil fuels and the like. Matteo Marangoni

 

Duet Of The Living Dead – Taro Yasuno’s Zombie Music