Inside Tokyo’s Boutique Music Hardware: Light Reft

video upload by Light Reft [Sasha DZA]

"We run a tiny hardware company in Tokyo and made this short film about why we’re obsessed with noise. We’re thinking about filming a longer documentary about Japan’s small independent instrument makers.

With this video, we want to open a door into the world of Japan’s independent music hardware scene, a world that usually remains outside the attention of a wider audience.

We are Light Reft, a small company founded by a group of enthusiasts in Tokyo. Over the past few years, we have developed and released two instruments of our own - monolit and concrete. You can learn about us on our web-site www.lightreft.jp

But we are far from alone.

In Tokyo and across Japan, there are many small independent companies, workshops, and individual makers creating unusual musical instruments, effects, and electronic devices. Many of them remain virtually unknown outside a small circle of musicians, even though this is where some genuinely interesting things are happening.

This video is only the beginning.

If you would like to see a full-length film about Japan’s independent music hardware scene, meet the people who design and build instruments themselves, visit their workshops, and find out why they do what they do - let us know in the comments.

And please share this video. If we see that people are genuinely interested in this world, we’ll continue and try to show this scene from the inside.

Video & Editing - Evgeny Joy
Sound - Sasha DZA (Light Reft)"