Jonáš Gruska‘s Juggler / ジャグラ does more than what it says on the tin. Originally assembled from covert recordings made inside an Akihabara pachinko parlour, the album documented a moment of revelation: Gruska discovering that beneath the assaultive barrage of gambling machines lay an accidental drone, a strange and unexpectedly serene harmony emerging from repetition, excess and addiction. Following copyright challenges from the manufacturer of the machines, the album was substantially reworked and reissued in 2026. Rather than diminishing the project, the transformation has deepened it.
The revised version feels less literal, less claustrophobic and more dreamlike than the original. The opening “Juggler / ジャグラー (Resonant Remix)” drifts into ethereal ambient territory, extracting resonances from the source material. The album also sees the contribution of a number of different artists, each taking the original material into unexpected directions. Lénok, for instance, delivers an incantatory lullaby with “Tokyo dr4ft”, while MSHR subjects the recordings to a kind of sonic spin cycle, reducing them to hiss, gurgles and crumpled textures that hover at the edge of recognisability on “Juggler with Fourteen Balls.”
The most direct connection to Akihabara arrives from Takako Minekawa, who situates the material within the district’s layered history of electronics, retro-futurism and hidden urban spaces with “ガラス管の向こう側は秋葉原の路地裏” (“Beyond the Glass Tube is a Back Alley in Akihabara”). It is perhaps the album’s clearest glimpse of the pachinko parlour culture. By contrast, bod [包家巷] “gambling” introduces unexpected elegiac notes onto cascading electronics with “gambling”.
The closing track “sculpture 01: 2024/10/28 pachinko parlor UNO, Akihabara, Tokyo” from mw encapsulates the album’s central tension. After extended passages of glitches, loops and abstraction, the untreated pachinko recordings gradually emerge from beneath the processing, as if reality were slowly resurfacing through layers of interpretation. It is a remarkably effective gesture that reframes the entire album.
What makes Juggler so fascinating is that the copyright dispute became part of the artwork rather than an obstacle to it. The reissue shifts the focus away from the machines themselves and towards the perception of them: not gambling technology, but accidental composition; not documentation, but listening. In doing so, Juggler raises intriguing questions about field recording, authorship and ownership while remaining, above all, a deeply immersive and surprisingly beautiful record.
Helping us to make sense of the album Jonáš Gruska answered a few questions for us.
Photo by Ester Mládenková
Juggler began as a covert act of field recording inside a pachinko parlor in Akihabara, a space where recording is effectively forbidden. Did the “illegality” of the act itself become part of the conceptual framework of the album?
Yes, the sensation of constantly being monitored by the employees of the parlor was a part of the experience. Basically, it felt like the only allowed action was to spend money. Sitting, observing, and listening on its own is suspicious and quickly grabs unwanted attention. the guests of the establishment, of course, didn’t care, the machines are extremely loud and captivating, so one does completely immerse oneself.
One of the most striking aspects of the record is your description of hearing dozens of identical machines unexpectedly merge into a kind of drone composition. What was it about that experience that transformed what could be perceived as noise, advertising, and gambling stimuli into something almost meditative or transcendent?
I believe ever since I started working with drone and ambient music, I became sensitive to „accidental“ drones in our environment. Hums, purrs, and buzzes of machines in the city can be very calming and harmonizing. I often found myself just appreciating electrical transformers and their calm 50/60 Hz buzz. This was a similar sensation, hearing beyond the individual effects of the machines and appreciating the deeper harmony of the emitted sounds. This was only possible when the parlor arranged the same machines in multiple rows and I actually had to look for this specific situation for a while.
In June 2026, Juggler was reissued in a substantially altered form following copyright and rights-related concerns around the source material. Can you explain what happened, and how you navigated the tension between field recording, authorship, intellectual property, and the reality that these sounds were already part of a heavily controlled commercial environment?
I was approached by the company that creates these machines and after some explanations on both sides I decided to recreate the original work to comply with their request. I originally argued about the ambient field recording practice, but in the end decided to see the request as a creative challenge and an inspiring piece of the story.
The new edition is described as treating those legal and copyright constraints as part of the artwork itself, both sonically and visually. How did the reissue differ from the original version, and did being forced to rework the material ultimately change your understanding of the project or reveal possibilities you had not considered before?
I was not forced to rework it. But the only other option was pulling the release completely. I felt like that perhaps the point of the recording was not the sound effects themselves, but the overall harmony that is present in that situation. So I extracted the most dominant frequencies and used algorithmic composition practice to rework the recording into “resonant edit”. This is slightly inspired by Alvin Lucier’s classic piece I am sitting in a room, but without the room—using just the track itself as the source of resonances.
The title *Juggler* evokes both the famous pachinko machine series and the act of keeping multiple elements in motion at once. Looking back now, the album seems to juggle memory, addiction, childhood impressions, urban soundscape, field recording practice, legal restrictions, and artistic transformation. Do you see the reissued version as the definitive statement of the work, or as another stage in an ongoing process of reinterpretation?
I would add one more layer to your interpretation — the remixing parties involved are also my fellow “jugglers” handling the recording in their own art-practice-hands. Some of them even feel like a circus experience. The new rework offers a bit of dynamic in a classically “fixed” medium, which I never did before but surprisingly enjoy. It makes me rethink the idea of static releases that will forever remain the same.
You have devoted a significant part of your artistic practice to field recording, often approaching it as a way of documenting and listening to the world as it is. Juggler seems to complicate that idea: the recordings are made covertly, the source material is highly mediated and commercial, and the project itself was later reshaped by copyright concerns. Did this experience change your understanding of what a field recording can be? Has it altered the way you think about authorship, documentation, or the relationship between capturing reality and transforming it into art?
To be honest, I never expected such an obscure project to grab so much attention. My field recording albums were never as popular as my music, so this caught me slightly off guard. But I received a huge amount of positive feedback from random people online, people that don’t even normally listen to field recordings. So there is something about this type of work that can transcend my usual audience and that is very inspiring.
(Gianmarco Del Re)
a closer listen 