Every city has its soundtrack; Tokyo's might be one of talking teller-machines, incessant advertising, the platform music of the Yamanote Line, stock-market reports, trite pop songs and immense audio-visual billboards. Yoshihide Otomo records sounds like this and organizes them into a bristling, kaleidoscopic vision of our world.

But there is more to Otomo than sonic documentary and musique-concrete collage. The past year has seen this prolific musician (over 100 shows in 1995, more than half of them in Europe, the former U.S.S.R. and the U.S.) branching into increasingly diverse collaborations and releasing three groundbreaking albums.

Otomo's music is not, in general, easy-listening. Drawing upon a range of instruments that most musicians would discount as mere tools--turntables, samplers, Mini Disk players and DAT machines--he veers from sounds that are tranquil and reassuring to noises that are ominous and abrasive. Listening to an Otomo album is to be drawn into a semi-conscious debate about the act of listening itself--and what we sometimes blindly accept as "music"; a point that two of his 1995 releases, Tatakiuri (with British violinist Jon Rose) and the powerful Revolutionary Pekinese Opera (with his own ensemble, Ground Zero) drive home with sometimes overwhelming force.

While Otomo can wield an electric guitar as if it were a chainsaw, wrenching from it howls of feedback and manic, wall-of-sound squiggles, his abilities are firmly grounded. He has proved himself capable of making accessible, "conventional" music that is emotionally powerful, mesmerizingly simple and beautiful. Take the soundtrack he composed for the Chinese film The Blue Kite (winner, Grand Prix, 1993 Tokyo International Film Festival) for example--or the music he was invited to create as a result of that commission: the lushly orchestrated score for Hong Kong filmmaker Yim Ho's feature, The Day the Sun Turned Cold (winner, Grand Prix, 1994 Tokyo International Film Festival).

Otomo has also been extremely active in establishing contact with other Asian musicians and is well-known for his critical appraisal of the Japanese music industry. But perhaps the best way for us to explain our choice of Otomo this year is to paraphrase his words as an expression of our ongoing dedication to artists of his kind: "This is not the end result of an assignment," he wrote in his liner notes to The Blue Kite. "It is the start of a new commitment."