Sawako

Last winter, I was rummaging through the bins in the Boston area's best underground music shop, Twisted Village. I found a CD with a great cover - a photo of a gray, rainy streetscape that I instantly recognized as “somewhere in Japan. “ The title of the CD was HUM, by an artist named Sawako. As it was released on the 12k label, I thought that it was a safe bet to give the CD a try. Upon first listen, I detected a new, unique voice in electronic music and the album became an immediate favorite. Impressionistic in its approach, the songs on HUM captured strong feelings - impressions - of, say, the "Way Home From School," or a "White Sky Winter Chicada."

Sawako, it turns out, is Sawako Kato, an electronic music and visual artist transplanted to New York from Nagoya and later, Tokyo (where, as she says, “I grew up as an artist.”). We spent Saturday afternoon in Cha-an, a fabulous teahouse in New York's Greenwich Village, discussing her music and current projects.

Sawako originally studied video art at Keio University SFC. While studying in the school's interdisciplinary program, she met musician and FFTease developer Chris Penrose. Inspired by this opportunity, she feels that she made a "natural progression into audio editing" from visual editing. (Today, she says that she enjoys her musical and visual pursuits equally, as both are "time-line based art forms.") After Keio University, she came to New York and entered the Masters degree program at NYU in order to explore, “something I never experienced before, with the other students and teachers who have totally different knowledge, culture, and experiences.”

She and Taylor Deupree, the founder of the 12k label, encountered each other on her first trip to NYC. A mutual friend, 12k artist Kenneth Kirschner, recommended that Taylor listen to Sawako’s first CD, “Yours Gray.” Taylor liked the CD and, three years after their first meeting, he released the aforementioned HUM on 12k.

Sawako is currently quite excited (no cliche, here – she’s exuberant when discussing these projects) about several collaborations with which she is currently involved. One of these projects is with the Touch label sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard. She and Jacob are collaborating on sound files of his cello performances! Another project in the pipeline is with RF - the artist moniker for Ryan Francesconi - a west coast based musician and programmer. Finally, she's been providing vocals for the Japanese duo of Radiozonde - a wonderful guitar/electronic music duo who, earlier this year, were documented in this blog. (See the post entitled, Installing, from Saturday, July 29, 2006: Radiozonde were the opening act for Installing at the Marbletron venue in Tokyo.)

Like several of my previous interviews, we spent some time discussing Japanese traditional culture and music. As has been the case before, this western observer senses a connection to those traditional arts in the spaces and silences found in Sawako's music. It turns out that Sawako studied Nohgaku when she was a child, and her parents practice Nohgaku to this day. (Nohgaku - or noh play - is the combination of the Noh and Kyogen theatrical arts.) She also professed a fondness for the sho - a fondness which I share - the traditional mouth organ instrument. We both agreed that its sound has an uncanny electronic quality for such an intrinsically acoustic instrument. She also finds the sho to be "very humanistic."

Near the end of the interview, I presented Sawako with an official invitation to join The Backyard Project. To my delight, she accepted. We now have four artists on board and I'm starting to feel quite hopeful regarding the possibility of this project getting off the ground in 2007.

Sawako CD list:

"Yours Gray" Label: and/OAR www.and-oar.org
HUM Label: 12k www.12k.com
“Omnibus" (mini album) Label: Community Library www.community-library.net