group A was formed in 2012 when art student and musician Tommi Tokyo met textile design graduate Sayaka Botanic and her friend Kaoru. Inspired by radical art movements of 20th century, Tommi's idea was to form a new band with non-musicians in attempt to approach music differently. Since their first performance at gallery COMMUNE in Tokyo, the project has explored the possibilities in breaking the preconceptions of live performance. The group (A) attempts to subvert the boundary between musical performance and performance art incorporating use of the body, live-painting, noise, acoustics, and poetry in their formative performances. This experiential vocabulary is one they continue to develop through their practice in the rejection of tradition and cliche that challenges them to expand the live music experience. The dichotomous nature of absence and presence is continuously investigated in constructing the live output of the group.
Frequent collaborations with visual artists, dancers, and scenographers of different practices is one of the crucial processes in their experimentation both of sound and performance. During the first 4 years of their activities in Tokyo, group A frequently organised live audio visual performances in collaboration with their fellow visual artists. In 2014 they held a night of experimental live A/V dance performance in collaboration with Japanese experimental visual artist Eetee and Butoh-esque dance performer Nissa Nishikawa at KATA Gallery. Later that same year the duo started a series of live A/V and exhibition night called PROJECT A at the centre of Tokyo avant-garde music scene at the time Super Deluxe in collaboration with one of Japan's top visual artists Rokapenis. In 2018 the duo teamed up with choreographer Christoph Winkler for their first theatre piece, "Ernest Berk The Complete Expressionist" (Berlin HAU2, CTM Festival, Berlin, 2018) in which the duo recreated one of Ernest Berk's early tape loop percussive pieces into new primordial industrial hypnotic rhythms. In Dana Gingras' multimedia performance piece, "anOther" (Agora de la Danse, Montreal, 2018) the band performed as mysterious figures behind a wall of old televisions, playing original scores live. Berlin based visual artist Dead Slow Ahead frequently collaborates for selected A/V performances including Roskilde Festival and Berlin Atonal, visualising a bizarre world of group A with analog macro video and 3d generative abstractions. More theatre and dance projects to come in 2021.
The duo has been programmed into Le Guess Who?(NL), Donaufestival(AT), OFF Festival (PL) and Dark Mofo (AU) to name a few, and released multiple records on Mannequin Records in Berlin.