Biography

Yu Miyashita is an electronic musician, composer, DJ, and mixing/mastering engineer. With music production at his core, his practice transcends philosophy, architecture, and management, integrating sound, language, space, and organization into "structure."  Focusing on the coexistence of polar opposites—spirituality and reality, contradiction and order, sacred and secular, life and death, sanity and madness—he presents his work not as "consumable sound" but as "internal structures."

His work has expanded to include feature films and documentaries, fashion shows, architectural films, art installations, theater, and museums. His signature work includes the soundtrack for "This Is Not A Burial, It's A Resurrection." The unit another:, comprised of architectural photographer Laurian Ghinitoiu and film director Arata Mori, has been collaborating with him for architectural and art films by artists such as BIG, OMA, SO-IL, and Chiharu Shiota. He has also produced runway music for the fashion brand VIVIANO.

In recent years, he has also become deeply involved in the realities of architectural and spatial sites and organizational management, strengthening his perspective of viewing philosophy and implementation as the same structure. His label, The Collection Artaud, presents sound works that eschew explanations and decoration and return to the act of listening itself. Centered around "silent dialogue" and "the back-and-forth between silence and playback," he pursues the boundary between sound and words, and a listening experience that is like prayer.

Testimonials

“The entire film, in fact, is made more haunting by its sound design, and by Yu Miyashita’s score. Listen to the low and scratchy drone of the music as Mantoa finds her home ablaze, and then, afterward, to the high keening of the strings as she sits amid the ashes, on her charred bedstead, with sheep nosing peacefully around her.”
- Anthony Lane at The New Yorker

"Yu Miyashita has been releasing mind bending breaks-oriented music as Yaporigami since 2006. His production prowess has become more intricate over time, with the microscopic sonic structures of his Chaos Swallower EP. Dreamy synths instigate a myriad of fluctuations on the full-bodied ‘Hello World’, and staggered pulses of noise and intermittent electronica build and build throughout ‘Damn It Demon’. Sounds are welded together across a serpentine set of tracks that swallow chaos and spew out beauty."
- Bleep

"Somehow elegantly weightless yet utterly bombed out and forceful”
- Boomkat

“The director suffuses the piece with an entrancing mysticism, accompanied by a spectral score by Yu Miyashita. Its sharp dissonance resonates as if it were a choir of voices screaming from the afterlife.”
- Carlos Aguilar at RogerEbert

"While the glitch pioneers tended to favour a stripped down minimalism, Miyashita takes advantage of advances in processing power to create maximalist symphonies of jittery orchestral samples, granular synthesis and dense textural wash. --- his complex creations are well crafted and worth checking."
- Cyclic Defrost

"Digital art star, beatsmith / sound artist"
- The Creators Project

"Like a dance record cultivated in the dark, nurtured away from conventional genre expectations."
- foxy digitalis

“Along with the images, the score by Yu Miyashita and its accompanying sound design constitute a challenge to conventional Western film language. It’s a welcome and necessary one, I think.”
- Glenn Kenny at RogerEbert

“Yu Miyashita is a deep thinker and a builder of worlds. Philosophy and architecture run through his veins and serve as guiding principles in his life, informing his work as a musician. His latest full-length project IDM Collection 21-25 / The Structure of Silence is both an excellent album of electronic music, and a written manifesto examining silence itself and the artist’s intimate relationship with it. Such material might serve as an introspective set of liner notes — but he goes deeper into the psyche by volumes. In fact the text becomes an exploded view of Miyashita himself, listing affirmations of his own beliefs, born out of past trauma, altered states of consciousness, prominent musical influences, and more. This reads like an intellectual prism, or a philosopher’s library of private journals. Miyashita is sharing the microscope through which he analyzes his ego. With a magnificent soundtrack. --- By examining silence, Miyashita teaches the listener to pay greater attention to every sound that breaks it. In turn, we discover how uniquely he views his own process when he writes about his own ‘collapse’ and ‘rebirth’. Destruction and reconstruction are recurring themes in both his music and text. / By examining silence, Miyashita teaches the listener to pay greater attention to every sound that breaks it. In turn, we discover how uniquely he views his own process when he writes about his own ‘collapse’ and ‘rebirth’. Destruction and reconstruction are recurring themes in both his music and text. “
- Glenn Swan at Panhandle Rag

“This is the kind of release Warp wants for its 30th anniversary.”
- GROOVE

“Warm, Aphex Twin works inspired IDM Electronica”
- Hard Wax

"Esoteric excursion / A strange, hypnotic creation that sounds timeless, as if droning on for longer than you’ve been alive."
- Igloo Magazine

"Ten tracks spread over 52-minutes, here see a wide range of musical bliss shattered into hundreds of pieces. From the soothing downtempo musings of the opening track “Lotus Bloom” to the emotively charged “Sacred Tree Ring,” to the effervescent flow of “Diced Garden,” to the cascading beauty and glitch breaks of “8,000,000,” IDMMXX runs its course through a myriad of soundscapes and doesn’t let up. Elsewhere you’ll find lullaby melodies and broken beats on pieces like “Cherub, Eve and Adam” and “Music Box Film” as well as explosively shuffled percussion on “Infinity Under Palace” and “Dual Feathers.” Yaporigami brings it all home in an ode to Aphex Twin (perhaps?) on “I Care Because (I Sense) You Do” where ambient ice blossoms flicker as a serene landscape of emotion passes by our field of vision. IDMMXX is all of the above, and just a little bit more if you let it simmer. While there are many well-executed sonic ideas spread throughout, these are truly blissful IDM’esque passages worth adding to your catalog, coming from a sound sculptor who continues to fine-tune his craft."
- Pietro Da Sacco at Igloo Magazine

"Fully deconstructed electronics from a devoted soundsmith. Darkness lingers, patient and absolute."
- Pietro Da Sacco at Igloo Magazine 

"The film’s memorable visuals are matched by its soundtrack. Electronic composer Yu Miyashita, born in Japan but based in Berlin like Mosese, provides the film with a musical score that frequently dissolves into static and swells into shrill, harsh tones, a sonic interpretation of the unstoppable wave that is set to wash away everything Mantoa holds dear. In marked contrast to these aggressively modern sounds."
- Lee Jutton at Film Inquiry

"A jarring mix of ethereal soundscapes and abrasive noise."
- The Quietus

“The score, in particular, is a standout for me. Japanese composer Yu Miyashita, who also goes under the name Yaporigami (great IDM in the same vein as Aphex Twin) creates a twisted, unsettling and terrifying sound collage that is unlike anything else I’ve heard over the past year in film and is a likely candidate for my favourite score of 2020. It perfectly embodies the tense undercurrent surging within Mantoa, adding a specific flavour to the film that truly differentiates itself from anything else you will see over the past year.”
- Perrin Faerch at Poorly Written Musings

"It is like an extraordinary Joan Miro's abstract art painting "The Song Of The Vowels"" where symbolic reduction of the flexible and unexamined forms create a thrilling fiction of existentialism. These controversial interpretations that vary among the agility, simplicity, joy, whimsical charm and nightmarish distortions undoubtedly mirror the versatility, intensity and profundity of Yaporigami. His music somehow reflects a current constant stylistic mutation and renewal of Techno scene."
- Secret Thirteen

"Yu Miyashita's music hits you like a wave, in which each droplet of water is replaced by a string of digitized code. When first hit, it is impossible to decipher anything but raw emotion and sound, such is the seemingly impenetrable structure of it, resplendent in white noise mutated by the human hand."
- Silent Ballet

"We quickly realised that his work was some of the most unique music we had heard in some time."
- Stray Landings

"His visual approach, accompanied by an ethereal musical score composed by Japanese musician, Yu Miyashita, is dreamlike, visionary, and otherworldly."

- Wael Khairy at RogerEbert