Yuko Oshima

Japanese rock drummer and composer Yuko Oshima has lived in France since the 2000s, where she attended École des Percussions as well as Conservatoire National in Strasbourg, later specialising in improvised music. One half of the Donkey Monkey duo, with Eve Risser, she performed at Moers Jazz Festival, Vancouver Jazz Festival and Tokyo Jazz Festival, among others, prior to embarking on her first solo project in 2015. With Eric Broitmann (Motus) she performed as Bishinkodo, offering a mixture of drums and acousmatics. In 2018 she founded improv trio Hiyomeki, to further develop her ideas for instantaneous codified composition. Her search for new sounds, using her drum kit and metal accessories, extends to theatre and dance. In Sourdre, for example, she joined Damien Briançon in a quest for a new language of improvisation.

Yuko Oshima  searches for space and subjective variations in silences in the culture of Japan and its conception of time: an “in-between space” that appears and disappears according to the performer’s intentions. This led her to combine her knowledge and practice of western music with her native culture, sowing the seeds for her KefuKefu project in 2008. In this new venture to master the notion of time and, specifically, its beat, Oshima used her residency to learn from Japanese masters of nori, aka Japanese groove. She assimilates and confronts these intervals through traditional nagauta pieces and hayashi percussion: both typical accompaniments to traditional Japanese theatre.

Portrait : Yuko Oshima, crédit Stéfanie Marcus
Photos : Yuko Oshima_credit Sem Brundu
Yuko Oshima_credit Kurt Rade
Yuko Oshima_2019_credit Ken Carl