When Clive Tanaka finally found his voice, he ended a family tradition of silence that stretched back half a century.
For 11 years, Clive almost never left his room in his family’s home outside of Sapporo on Hokkaido, Japan’s huge northern island. “I was hikikomori,” Clive explains, one of almost a million boys and young men in Japan who shut themselves away and withdraw from society. In Clive’s case, he stopped going to school and retreated to his room after sustained episodes of vicious hazing and harassment by older students, a chronic problem in Japanese public schools.
But even before his own withdrawal when he was 14, Clive had first-hand experience of what silence and isolation was like. “My grandfather was a Soviet prisoner of war until 1949. He was a very young soldier in the [Japanese] army in Manchuria towards the end of the Pacific War [World War II] and was a POW many years longer than he was a soldier.” He married when he returned and seemed OK. But while watching the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, he saw the Soviet Union flag carried by Russian athletes, and something snapped. He did not speak another word for 20 years.
When Clive became hikikomori in 1989, he had no computer or Internet for amusement, only books and magazines that his parents would leave by his door, on a tray with his meals, and television. One day, his older sister put in front of his door a big box of her cast-off magnetic tape cassettes of 70’s and 80’s disco, dance and electronic music. At night, Clive’s family heard him dancing and singing along. Which gave his mother an idea. One New Year’s Day, his mother left a Yamaha DX7 keyboard outside his room. As a young boy, Clive had learned to play the violin and recorder through the Suzuki method. Alone, he taught himself how to play the piano keyboard, using only the instruction manual. And Clive started writing his own music. He credits the music with helping him gradually emerge from isolation in 2000, although he remains painfully shy.
Clive’s music is an amalgam of Giorgio Moroder, Cerrone, ABBA, Andy Gibb, Paradise Frame, Zapp & Roger, Men At Work, Grandmaster Flash, Fatback, Kool & The Gang, King Tubby, Daft Punk, Air and The Tom Tom Club. One reason may be because of the influence of his sister’s tape cassettes. “I played them over and over and over, and it started to bother my sister and my parents. Japanese houses have thin walls so even when I turned the volume down, it annoyed them. My sister slipped a note under the door that said, ‘I will buy you some current popular rock music if you will just please stop playing my old cassettes! I didn’t mind hearing those songs the first thousand times but I don’t like them anymore.’ The next day, there was a pair of headphones outside my door!”
Clive is working on a full-length album to be released on (what else?) cassette in 2010.


Alessandro Cortini is an Italian musician, producer, composer, and instrument builder. 

Cortini is one of the foremost figures of contemporary electronic music, best known for his haunting, atmospheric work. Alongside being a longstanding member of Nine Inch Nails, he is highly prolific and has released a steady stream of his own heady music on luminary labels including Mute, Hospital, and Important Records for the past decade. Throughout his shadowy rise to fame, he has collaborated with the likes of Lawrence English, Daniel Avery and Merzbow (to name a few). Balancing dark ambience with smokey, pulsing rhythms, his compositions are perfectly restrained, textured and mesmeric. 

Cortini was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020 through his work with Nine Inch Nails, making history as the only Italian musician to have ever been honored with this recognition. 

In 2021, in collaboration with boutique synth builders Make Noise, Cortini released his own, custom-designed, semi-modular synth, “Strega” (Italian for ‘witch’). That same year, he used Strega to build his latest full length, Scuro Chiaro [Mute], which Pitchfork described as “pitched somewhere between purgatory and the planetarium ... consistently managing to thrill and surprise”. 

In addition to years of extensive worldwide touring, Cortini has also soundtracked fashion shows including Alexander McQueen, Dior, and several of Fendi’s presentations. In 2022, he exhibited a high-concept audio installation called “Nati Infiniti” for Sonar 2022 at Museu de Lisboa’s “Fábrica de Moagem.” A live version of “Nati Infiniti” is set to debut at Berlin Atonal in 2023.

Alessandro Cortini’s music has been licensed for use in television, film and documentaries, games, and commercials, including FX’s hit show The Bear, “Thank You Very Much” a documentary about Andy Kaufman, Samsung, BMW, Sony, and Netflix. Remixes have also been a part of Cortini’s identity – remixing the likes of Depeche Mode to Mogwai to Death Cab For Cutie, Yann Tiersen to Vatican Shadow, and more between and beyond.

beaunoise is following