(This piece originally appeared in Issue #14 of Maggot Brain, albeit in an incomplete form. I spoke to the likes of Bill Laswell, Terre Thaemlitz, and Carl Stone for the story. But it was only when the issue went to print that I finally connected with the person closest to Inoue, Uwe “Señor Coconut”/ “Atom™” Schmidt. He clarified Inoue’s fate –and the truly cosmic circumstances that led to such closure– so this version is the most complete story about Inoue to date. For those who still wonder about Inoue, the answer lies herein.)
The blog post, posted in June of 2012 by someone who goes by the handle “Phonaut,” begins with some hand-wringing about individual privacy before asking the question outright: “Where Is Tetsu Inoue?” Phonaut still intermittently posts to their blog to this day, primarily ambient-leaning mixes of theirs. At the time of the post, it had been five years since the ordinarily prolific Inoue had released a new album (2007’s Inland). Phonaut goes on to report emails going unanswered, mail to Inoue’s New York address at 2350 Broadway (also the name for one of Inoue’s most revered monikers) going unanswered (though never marked ‘returned to sender’), close friends and label owners being unable to “resolve pending business issues.” Phonaut’s conclusion?
(1) He’s being reclusive
(2) He’s dead
Depending on the music websites, Discogs pages, Reddits, or far-flung internet spaces you visit, Tetsu Inoue is either an absolute master in ambient electronic music or else almost completely unknown and ignored. Inoue regularly put out albums through the late ‘90s and 2000s, well over forty according to his Discogs page (not counting his many, many collaborations around the world with everyone from Bill Laswell and Pete Namlook to Carl Stone and Atom Heart). Labels ranged wildly.
Dozens of releases came out on Pete Namlook’s Fax label (or FAX +49-69/450464 to be more precise). Namlook was a fellow ambient explorer, equally prolific. Namlook’s catalog is a vast universe unto itself; he topped 135 self-released titles on his own by 2005. Together, the two collaborated on dozens of releases on Fax and corresponded frequently. At the time of Phonaut’s posting, the best path to find Inoue would have been through Namlook. But five months later, Namlook died of a heart attack at age 51. Eleven years after that initial blog post and all of its follow-up comments –164 and counting– the initial question remains unresolved: Where is Tetsu Inoue? Is he dead? Or did he vanish? And just how do you and your vast catalog of music seemingly vanish in the 21st century? “The weirdest thing ever in my life was the disappearance of Tetsu,” Uwe Schmidt tells me from his home in Santiago, Chile. “This to me is an enigma. He was the only person who just vanished.”
***
In Hari Kunzru’s 2017 novel White Tears, his audio engineer protagonist treks around New York City with giant headphones on and shotgun mic, making field recordings everywhere he goes:
I’d record these small noises and fool around with them—making phrases, pitching them up and down. I was trying to hear something in particular, a phenomenon I was sure existed: a hidden sound that lay underneath the everyday sounds I could hear without trying.
For a brief moment in the 1998 music documentary Modulations: Cinema for the Ear, you can catch a glimpse of Inoue, engaged in a practice almost exactly like this. “Ambient stuff is more like texture and the shape of sounds,” he says as he sticks a condenser mic to capture the sound of his microwave, his trainers as he walks the floor, his front door shutting, the sound of washing dishes. “Living acoustic sound,” Inoue says with an inscrutable grin, as if to suss out a hidden sound underneath the everyday noise.
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