ROCK OF ASIA biography 

Nikki Matsumoto, who played rock music professionally for 15 years in America, founded the group project known as ROCK OF ASIA. ROCK OF ASIA is a musical genre that blends Western instruments like the guitar and violin with Eastern instruments like the koto, shamisen, sho, and erhu.

ROCK OF ASIA plays traditional Japanese music in addition to its original and cover songs. Since the group's founding in the winter of 2010, live performances have been ongoing. When ROCK OF ASIA arrived in Northern California in April 2010 for 3 performances in the Bay Area, American music fans welcomed them with open arms.

The group’s self-titled debut record was made available on March 11, 2011. Nikki Matsumoto postponed all of his tour plans because this date fell on the same day as the Japan massive earthquake and tsunami and spent the next 6 months volunteering to help the disaster stricken victims.

ROCK OF ASIA paid homage to the Arab Spring movement in 2012 by touring the Middle East and releasing their second album, "Virtual Colony." The band performed 8 concerts in the Middle East, including appearances at the Cairo Opera House, the Embassy of Japan in Cairo, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the Holy Square of the Nativity Church in Bethlehem.

Nikki Matsumoto worked on his solo project "Palestine On My Mind," which is dedicated to Palestine, for the following 4 years while touring primarily in Palestine, which included the Bet Lahem Live Festival in 2015 and 2016.

2019 saw the release of ROCK OF ASIA's third album, "The Ancient," and the band returned to the Middle East to perform as the headliner at the Opera House in Cairo. In order to mark the tenth anniversary of its debut album, it created the finest collection album entitled, "Asian Anthology," in 2021. The song "Lal Dhaga" won the hearts of music lovers all around the world and rose to No. 25 on Spotify's “Indie Stream Chart”.

The first half of 2023 has been used to create a fresh, enlightening studio album called "TAMI" and go on a brief tour of Asia, performing some of the previously unreleased songs for Singaporean and Indonesian audiences.