Ritual / Voice / Body & Sound Artist

 

Born in Kobe, Japan (1987)

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Ryo Fujimoto’s practice is rooted in the body as a site of survival and transformation. After the sudden death of his father at fourteen, he began generating sound not as music but as a visceral act of confirming he was still alive. That primal vibration became the irreversible origin of his work.

 

Fujimoto later became the only Japanese artist signed to a major European beatbox agency, touring forty cities across ten countries and performing at the Human Beatbox Convention (London) and the World Beatbox Championship (Berlin). His hybrid project Humanelectro, merging raw vocality with live electronics, gained international attention from Ableton Live, Gizmodo, and CoDesign (NY), leading to on-stage collaborations with Grammy-winning musicians including Robert Glasper and Bill Summers.

 

A decisive rupture occurred in 2015. A direct encounter with systemic violence in the Israel–Palestine region did not merely shift his political awareness—it broke the bodily language he had relied on. Techniques no longer carried meaning; what remained was sound as testimony, breath as survival, and voice as a raw signal of existence. He withdrew from major stages for nearly a decade, rebuilding his practice from silence, body, and ritual.

 

Since returning in 2024, Fujimoto works through a completely reconfigured “second-form physiology”—a body shaped by survival reflexes rather than technique. Front-foot weight, micro-floating heels, serpentine sway, and beats generated not by breath but by reflex form the basis of his current method. For him, sound is no longer expression but the materialization of vital intensity, expanded through CV, analog machines, and digital systems.

 

Ritual in his practice is not symbolism or spirituality but a generative condition in which sound, time, and movement arise autonomously as the body oscillates between four states:

 

1. Wild Voice / Sakebi (pre-human / primal)

2. Beat (animal–human hybrid)

3. Song (human)

4. Electronics (non-human / material)

 

These states surface as if the body were remembering something beneath culture. They form ritual environments where sound is not composed but emerges—alive, unstable, and self-generating.

 

Fujimoto’s work is therefore not the expression of a person,
but the activation of a living ecosystem.

 

His question is no longer “What shall we express?”

but rather: “How can a body—reconfigured, damaged, rebuilt—reconnect with a world that has forgotten how to feel?