"Akira Sakata (坂田明; born 21 February 1945 in Kure, Hiroshima) is a Japanese free jazz saxophonist.

Sakata began studying music seriously at high school, where he played clarinet.[1] He played alto sax in a jazz band when at Hiroshima University.[1] He trained as a marine biologist.

Sakata joined the Yamashita Yosuke Trio from 1972 till 1979 and toured internationally with them. In 1986, he performed with Last Exit with Bill Laswell. This performance was released as 1987's Noise of Trouble: Last Exit Live in Tokyo. Laswell went on to play bass on and produce Sakata albums such as Mooko, Silent Plankton and Fisherman's.com, the last of which also featured the reclusive Pete Cosey (who had worked with Miles Davis) on guitar.[2]

In 1994, Sakata organized a one-month tour of Uzbekistan, Mongolia and China with the Flying Mijinko Band, consisting of 14 members from Japan, Africa and America. Some of those included were Laswell, Anton Fier and Foday Musa Suso.

He has more recently worked with DJ Krush[3] and Chikamorachi (Darin Gray and Chris Corsano)."

"O'Rourke was born on January 18, 1969 in Chicago, Illinois. He is an alumnus of DePaul University. He has released albums of jazz, noise, glitchy electronica and rock music. O'Rourke has collaborated with Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Derek Bailey, Mats Gustafsson, Mayo Thompson, Brigitte Fontaine, Loren Mazzacane Connors, Merzbow, Nurse with Wound, Phill Niblock, Fennesz, Organum, Phew, Henry Kaiser, Flying Saucer Attack, and in 2006 mixed Joanna Newsom's album Ys. In 2009, he also mixed several tracks on Newsom's follow up Have One On Me.

He has produced albums by artists such as Sonic Youth, Wilco, Stereolab, Superchunk, Kahimi Karie, Quruli, John Fahey, Smog, Faust, Tony Conrad, The Red Krayola, Bobby Conn, Beth Orton, Joanna Newsom and U.S. Maple. He mixed Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot album and produced their 2004 album, A Ghost Is Born, for which he won a Grammy Award for "Best Alternative Album". During the recording of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, O'Rourke collaborated with Wilco member Jeff Tweedy and pre-Wilco Glenn Kotche under the name Loose Fur. Their self-titled debut was released in 2003 with a follow-up in 2006 entitled Born Again in the USA. He also mixed the unfinished recordings that made up a planned third album by the late American singer-songwriter Judee Sill, recorded in 1974 and mixed by O'Rourke for a 2005 release.

O'Rourke was once a member of Illusion of Safety, Gastr Del Sol (with David Grubbs) and Sonic Youth. Beginning in 1999 he played bass guitar, guitar and synthesizer with Sonic Youth, in addition to recording and mixing duties with the group. He withdrew as a full member in late 2005, but continued to play with them in some of their side projects. In the early 1993, O'Rourke formed an avant-rock group with Darin Gray and Dylan Posa called Brise-Glace. The band released one studio album, When in Vanitas..., in 1994. They also released a 7" in the same year titled In Sisters All and Felony/Angels on Installment Plan.

O'Rourke has also released many albums under his own name on a variety of labels exploring a range of electronic and avant-garde styles. His most well-known works may be his series of releases on Drag City, which focus on more traditional songcraft: Bad Timing (1997), Eureka (1999), Insignificance (2001), The Visitor (2009) and Simple Songs (2015). The titles of the first four albums all refer to films by the British director Nicolas Roeg; the first three by direct reference to film titles, the fourth being titled after a fictional album within Roeg's film The Man Who Fell To Earth. With music director Takehisa Kosugi, he played for the Merce Cunningham dance company for four years. O'Rourke received a 2001 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award."

"Giovanni Di Domenico, pianist, performer, composer, was born in Rome on the 20th July 1977, a significantly tempestuous period in socio-political terms, featuring hostile polarizations and an ostensive paramilitarism, mutinous ideological confrontations and bloody terrorist attacks, rendered infamous in the description 'Years of Lead'. In that particularly caustic summer, the so-called 'Movement of 1977', non-aligned, without any ties to the Parliament and non-violent, broke into the scene of prevalent conspiracy-steeped paranoia condemning the repressive, discriminatory and authoritarian tendencies of the Italian State and demanding equality for minorities and further civil rights. The coinciding liberalization of the media market, putting an end to RAI's monopoly, further defined this period as the prime moment for pirate radio, with the consequence of a libertarian fragmentation of youth culture, epitomised by punk.

One could argue that Giovanni, self-taught until the age of 24, inherited - in philosophy, politics and artistically - the most benign and affirmative traits of that period, diversifying his action in the context of a recently unified Europe, promoting improbable connections, exploring varied geographies, comfortably manoeuvring aesthetical fringes and making a commitment to live performance at its most liberating and engaging. Surprisingly, the path that lead him to that point had an unexpected detour: following his father's consecutive assignments as a civil engineer he actually lived out his first decade in Africa - until he was five in Libya, from then until his eight anniversary in the Cameroons and until ten in Algeria. His far off native country was not synonymous with civil unrest as much as with opera, whose arias he would memorize with his siblings in order to practice the language and provide some family entertainment. The condition of expatriate had a strong influence in his education - he clearly remembers the calls of the muezzin, the sound of exotic musical instruments in local markets, the ritualistic expression music took in the streets of Yaoundé, or the songs he heard from his nanny in the Cameroons.

When he finally enrolled in music school - majoring in 'jazz piano'- he further built on an encyclopedic technique; rhythm, harmony and tone are informed by non-western traditions yet equally sensitive to Debussy's "Préludes", Luciano Berio's "Sequenzas", to the 'ambi-ideation' heard in Borah Bergman's Soul Note recordings, Cecil Taylor's polissemic density, Paul Bley's bruised transparency and of course, the most radical manifestations stemming from the underworld of pop music, invariably tied together by his own original praxis. A distinction - one would call it generational - he shares with many of the musicians he has crossed paths with recently, artists as different as Chris Corsano, Jim O'Rourke, Akira Sakata, Tetuzi Akiyama, Okkyung Lee, Balasz Pandi, Nate Wooley, Yan Jun, John Edwards, Darin Gray, Roger Turner, Steve Noble, DJ Sniff, Terrie Ex, David Maranha, Manuel Mota, Arve Henriksen, Norberto Lobo, Peter Jacquemyn, Alexandra Grimal, John Duncan, Tony Allen, Rafael Toral or Toshimaru Nakamura. Di Domenico has founded his own label, Silent Water, home of an eclectic and occasionally unclassifiable production. He lives in Brussels."

"Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, born on Oct 25, 1982, in Yamaguchi, Japan, is a pure acoustic drummer, not an electric drummer. He plays primarily improvised music, and participates in a variety of bands, projects, supporting singers, and has produced multiple recordings. Yamamoto's solo acoustic performance succeeds in combining dynamism, melodicism and polyrhythm, fusing overwhelming volume with delicate technique.

Yamamoto has also collaborated with artists such as Otomo Yoshihide, Jim O'Rourke, Sachiko M, RUINS, Seiichi Yamamoto (ex.boredoms), Kazuhisa Uchihashi, Keiji Haino, Akira Sakata, Kumio Kurachi, Daisuke Takaoka, Makoto Kawabata (AcidMotherTemple), Munehiro Narita(HIGHRISE), Mitsuru Tabata(ZENI-GEVA/AMT&TCI), Masahiko Sato, Yuji Takahashi, Gianni Gebbia, Ned Rothenberg, Daniele Camalda, Alan Silva, and many others.

Yamamoto's main projects are SSW, a duo with "Eiko Ishibashi"; "NATSUMEN", a band lead by AxSxE; acoustic & synthesized drums duo with Muneomi Senju (ex.Boredoms); "Plus Minus Zero"a live electronica & psychedelic prog jam trio with Yuji Katsui (ROVO) and marron a.k.a. dubmarronics; "FirstMeeting," an acoustic noise improvisation Quartet with Natsuki Tamura, Satoko Fujii, and Kelly Churko; "Ohanami," a unit with Yoshio Machida on the steelpan; as well as recordings with the Kahimi Karie band featuring Otomo Yoshihide and Jim O'Rourke. Recently he has been performing regularly with Jim O'Rourke. He participates in, and organizes multiple projects around Tokyo."