Born in Okinawa to a Guyanese mother and Japanese father, Nishikawa was raised between naval bases. Her childhood was a collage of overlapping radio frequencies—U.S. Navy chatter, Japanese enka ballads, Calypso broadcasts bleeding through shortwave. She learned to hear borders as acoustic events.
For Yui Nishikawa, that silence is home.
Nishikawa, a 34-year-old Japanese-Caribbean sound artist, has spent the last decade archiving what she calls “the planet’s accidental music.” But where other artists seek clarity, Nishikawa chases degradation. i--- Caribbean -042816-146- -042816-551- Yui Nishikawa
“Some questions are better as static,” she says.
By [Your Name]
And then the line goes silent. Not a drop. A dash.
“The dash is the most important part,” she tells me, her voice soft over a patchy VoIP connection from a catamaran off the coast of Dominica. “The numbers are coordinates. The dashes are the silence between them. Without the silence, you just have data. With it, you have a story.” Born in Okinawa to a Guyanese mother and
There is a specific kind of silence that exists only in the Caribbean at 3:00 AM. It’s not empty—it’s heavy. It carries the weight of trade winds, centuries of colonial static, and the low hum of satellite relays bouncing between islands.
For Yui Nishikawa, that is the answer.
Caribbean Basin / Archive Ref: 042816-146 / 042816-551
