Junko

Known for her relentless, dynamic, high-pitched shrieking, Junko is a Japanese vocalist and a longtime member of the notoriously unhinged noise outfit Hijokaidan (Emergency staircase), fronted by her husband Jojo Hiroshige and founded in 1978. Whether singing a cappella or accompanied by the frenetic rhythms of Michael Henritzi or Akira Sakata, Junko finds an anti-melodic, anti-symbolic pleasure in the varied textures of her voice. Her wails, screeches, and howls—fluctuating dizzyingly in timbre, temperature, and tone—do not mean as much as they simply are. But they do create a transcendent porousness between sound and music, background or foreground noise. While Western critics have often struggled to get beyond the so-called harsh, confrontational quality of Junko’s sound, she is perhaps best understood as an artist who radically expands her audience’s interpretive capacities, working in a mode too improvisational to be punk, too chaotic to be free jazz, and yet too intimate to be dismissed.