Goat

Goat is a musician based in Boerum Hill. The Osaka five-piece, led by guitarist Koshiro Hino, uses interlocking drums, muted bass, atonal saxophone, and detuned guitar harmonics to build compositions from rhythm upward.

Goat (jp) starts where melody ends. The Osaka five-piece, led by composer and guitarist Koshiro Hino, builds everything from the percussion up: two drummers locking into interlocking patterns, muted bass strings punched on every beat, saxophone pushed into atonal drones, and guitar harmonics pulled deliberately outside the chromatic scale. The premise, which Hino arrived at partly through an encounter with a monochrome geometric painting by Tomoo Gokita, is that rhythm alone can carry a composition all the way to trance. The 2023 album Joy In Fear (the group's first in eight years) mapped that thesis onto DAW-precision rhythms executed on live instruments. Their most recent release, Without References / Cindy Van Acker (2025), was composed as the score for choreographer Cindy Van Acker's dance piece of the same name, with scenography by Romeo Castellucci. The question goat keeps asking is whether a band can move a body the same way a machine does. And why that should feel like a choice.