Atsuko Kamura brings her extraordinary voice and melodic sense: a background in feminist punk-rock leading to avant-noise improvisation with Tenko, Zorn, et al in NYC, followed by a sequence of albums. On “4 am” her first solo album “she douses the anti musical strategies of the late-seventies Rock In Opposition movement … with a soupçon of fizzy electrics, her operatic voice navigating an echoing mirror maze of pulses and tones.” - Stewart Lee, in The Idler, May/June 2022.
One of Tokyo's most emotive and inventive artists, and a member of Japan’s 80’s women’s liberation movement, Kamura is a founder member of the first Japanese all-female punk band, Mizutama Shobodan, also known as Polkadot Fire Brigade, formed in 1979 in Tokyo. Kamura also teamed up with singer Tenko as the female improvisation vocal duo Honeymoons in 1981. They developed a unique style of avant-noise improvisation and performed internationally with seminal New York improvisers Tom Cora and John Zorn, and at the International Women's Music Festival in Montreal in 1988. Their album Laughing Myth, produced by Kenichi Takeda, was released in 1982. Kamura joined Kazuko Hohki’s UK-based Japanese pop group Frank Chickens in 1988, and toured Europe, the US, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, USSR and Japan. She also worked as a traditional Benshi narrator performing A Page of Madness with her original soundtrack at FILM FEST, an international silent film festival in Portugal.
