The renowned Japanese sculptor and musician Ujino Muneteru (born Tokyo, 1964) founded The Rotators in 2004, a band whose members consist of ordinary household appliances, including blenders, hairdryers and power tools. While Ujino’s work recalls both the Intonarumori (noise intones) invented by the Italian Futurist artist and composer Luigi Russolo and kinetic sculpture of Jean Tinguely, it also speaks of his childhood and adolescence in 1970s and early 1980s Japan, a time when that nation was undergoing rapid economic development. Growing up surrounded by American pop culture and then-novel plastic household appliances, his passion for Punk and New Wave led him towards an interest, as he puts it, in ‘art as material realism rather than the planar illusions of painting, manga and animation’.