musician

Active since the late 1970s, Junji Hirose is one of Japan’s preeminent free improvising musicians. As a sax player, he released his first solo recording in 1981, and shortly thereafter toured internationally as a member of Yoshiaki Fujikawa’s EastAsia Orchestra. He joined percussionist Masahiko Togashi’s band in 1984, and has since played as a core member of several high profile units, such as Masahiro Uemura’s avant rock/jazz band P.O.N., Hideaki Sasaki’s trio project Stereodrome (with Kazuhisa Uchihashi), Shibusashirazu Orchestra and Otomo Yoshihide’s band, Ground-Zero. 

Starting in 1981 with a track on his solo album titled ‘Hodgepodge’, Hirose also began to explore ‘noise sound’ and developed self-made instruments to serve this purpose. After creating a number of compact prototypes to use when touring, he settled on a type of noise machine that became his main instrument from the late 1980s. This spawned several years of collaboration with Otomo Yoshihide, resulting in the duo album Silanganan Ingay in 1989.

After withdrawing from improvised performance for a number of years, he began playing once again in the late 2000s in duo and trio formats with musicians such as Yasuhiro Yoshigaki, Toshimaru Nakamura, Yoshida Tatsuya and Atsuhiro Ito.