Over the coming weeks, FACT will be teaming up with the Alpha-ville festival to present podcasts from, and interviews with, emerging sound artists and electronic musicians. First up: Midori Hirano.
Midori Hirano has been playing music since from the disconcertingly young age of 5 when she used a piano to flesh out her earliest compositions. While this led her to major in classical piano at university, it was the less traditional aspects of electronica that would ultimately prove her major inspiration. A native to Kyoto, Japan but making the creative pilgrimage to Berlin in 2008, her productions are based around the use of traditional instrumentation – piano, strings, voice – and augmented with often subtle electronic processing and digital samples creating a rich, rolling sound that is at once warm and melodic while tracing unexpected musical trajectories.
Her first album, LushRush, was released on Nobel records in 2006 and was primarily a collaborative affair, seeing her work with a number of guest musicians to create one of those beautiful, sprawling debuts that radiates a hazy blissfulness upon first listen. Her second, Klo:Yuri, saw her further develop her sound, garnering critical acclaim from those in the know. She is also in demand as a composer of soundtracks for European and Asian films, with 2008 seeing her become the only Japanese composer to invited to take part in the Berlinale Talent Campus, hosted by the Berlin International Film Festival.
Listen: Alpha-podcast presents Midori Hirano
We caught up with Midori to get her to tell us a bit about the podcast, her own background and what inspires her to make music.
Tell us a bit about yourself…When did you start making music?
“I started creating music when I was 10 years old, maybe. I started learning piano at 5 years old and I became interested in composing later, and that led me to do recordings of my own music. I was only using a piano at the time of course, I couldn’t use any computers or synthesizers, so the piano was my inspiration. Sometimes I wrote down a note because I wanted to memorise it, and that was the beginning of my composing.”
What inspires you?
“What inspires me is everything around me in my daily life, so I can’t focus on one thing. But basically the people I meet or the other music in the world.”
Do you have any influences in your music? What are they?
“Many classical composers, also Cocorosie and Sigur Ros. In addition to those, I really also like the artists who release from a German electronic music label called Raster-Noton, like Alva-Noto and Frank Bretschneider because those artists always give me a lot of imagination for music, or just about creation.”
Tell us about the podcast you’ve made – why did you choose the records you did?
“Because I’ve known and liked the artists’ works for some years and I got to think it would be a good idea to let people hear the music via this podcast since the concept of Alpha-ville is to focus on emerging electronic artists, and I thought the artists I’ve picked fit.
“In this podcast, there are really subtle and delicate electronic sounds mixed with organic feelings like the music of El Fog and mine, or crazily cut-up experimental music like Kyoka’s, and also more danceable and advanced but still experimental feeling of music like Kashiwa Daisuke’s. So I think people can find and enjoy the differences between them, and of course the music itself.”
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