The single note of a bamboo flute rises from the static hiss, a muffled drum beat cuts through the noise. More flutes join in, a pulsating drone emerges. What sounds like a crude lo-fi sound art production is actually a moer than one hundred years-old recording of an even much older piece of music. It is called "Bairo" and belongs to the traditional Japanese court music, gagaku. It was recorded in Tokyo in February 1903 by the American Fred Gaisberg, who produced 275 shellac records with all kinds of music on it during a stay in the country.
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After the phonograph was first introduced at the University of Tokyo in 1878 and a modernised model with a wax cylinder was demonstrated to the God Emperor, the tennō, by US ambassadors in 1890, a small industry for manufacturing of phonographs emerged. But only the recordings pressed by Gaisberg on shellac, playable on the gramophone, survived the following hundred years and back in the day fulfilled the promotional purpose pursued by the Gramophone and Typewriter Company employee: they established recorded music, still a novelty at that time, in Japan and marked the beginning of a new age at the end of another.