The workshop of Kiriko Sound Works is so small that its founder, Daisuke Orihara, has to step outside to let a visitor in. It occupies a former tobacconist's kiosk on a narrow lane in Kuramae, the old warehouse district along the Sumida River that has lately filled with coffee roasters and leather ateliers. Inside, every surface is covered with circuit boards, spools of coloured wire and aluminium front panels waiting to be engraved by hand.
Orihara is twenty-nine and builds perhaps sixty instruments a year, each a compact analogue synthesizer housed in a case of Japanese cypress. He learned electronics from repair manuals and online forums, and learned patience, he says, from his grandfather, who made paper lanterns in Asakusa for half a century. The two crafts are more alike than they seem. Both involve light, tension and a great deal of waiting for glue to dry.
He is part of a loose community of perhaps two dozen independent makers scattered across Tokyo, most of them under thirty-five. Some build modular systems, cabinets of interchangeable units wired together with patch cables into sprawling, unpredictable instruments. Others, like Orihara, prefer small, self-contained designs. What unites them is a conviction that sound should come from real voltage moving through real components, rather than from code running on a laptop.
The sound of imperfection
Ask them why, and you tend to hear the same word: drift. Analogue circuits are sensitive to temperature, humidity and the tiny variations between individual parts. Two instruments built from identical schematics will never sound precisely alike, and a single instrument will sound slightly different in August than in February. For a software engineer this would be a flaw to eliminate. For these makers it is the whole point, a kind of living grain in the sound.
A plug-in is perfect every time. That is exactly why nobody ever falls in love with one. — Mio Tsukada
Mio Tsukada, who runs Tsubame Electronics from a second-floor studio in Shimokitazawa, builds modules that deliberately exaggerate this instability. Her most popular design, a filter she calls Rainy Season, responds to the warmth of the player's hands on its metal panel. Musicians from Berlin, Montreal and Seoul write to her asking to join the waiting list. She answers every letter personally, usually late at night, once the soldering is done.
The economics are precarious. Components have grown expensive, rents in Tokyo have climbed, and few of these makers earn more than a modest salary. Many hold part-time jobs, repairing audio equipment or teaching electronics workshops at weekends. Yet the community seems remarkably free of rivalry. Makers share suppliers, lend tools and gather on the last Friday of each month at a small bar in Koenji, where anyone can bring an instrument and plug in.
I went along one Friday. The room was hot and crowded, the walls lined with vintage speakers, and on a low stage a young woman coaxed long, glassy tones out of a machine Orihara had finished only that week. Nobody spoke while she played. When she finished, Orihara leaned over and admitted that he could not quite explain what he had built. He seemed entirely happy about that.
