Aki Onda

Aki Onda is an artist and composer whose works are often catalyzed by memories—private, collective, or historical. In their widely-known project Cassette Memories (2004–), for example, Onda draws from their personal collection of field-recorded tapes amassed over three decades, letting these calcified sonic snapshots layer and collide, creating mesmeric and spontaneous audio-visual palimpsests in the process. Onda’s live performances are inventive and site-specific, incorporating the unique spatial and visual attributes of the environment into each iteration and playing with audience expectation. At Blank Forms, Onda makes a too-infrequent return to New York, where they were based from 2003 to 2020, presenting a new, spartan realization of this ongoing cassette project. 

Working across genres, Onda has been active in art, film, music, and performance internationally, collaborating with Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Loren Connors, Raha Raissnia, Ho Tzu Nyen, Annea Lockwood, Akio Suzuki, among others. Onda is also active as a curator, and has organized major performances and exhibitions throughout Asia and North America. They currently work as the Curator-at-Large at Western Front, Vancouver. Previously with Blank Forms, Onda has performed in trio with Lockwood and Suzuki, produced the reissue of Suzuki and Takehisa Kosugi’s New Sense of Hearing (ALM-Uranoia, 1980), and interviewed Suzuki on the sound artist’s collaborative relationship with Kosugi for Journal 09: Sound Signatures.