Midori Hirano

midori hirano is a musician, composer, sound artist and producer, born in Kyoto/Japan and now based in Berlin/Germany. She has been playing music since from the 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 Noble 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 various magazines in the world including TIME magazine. 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. After she relocated to Berlin in 2008, she has succeeded in doing her solo European tour in which she has done more than 40 concerts in 12 countries. Also she has been active in the sound/media art field since she participated to the realtime online audio/visual performance collaborating with other artists around the world using by the networked technology which was developed by Visitors Studio in England. And then currently she is working on soundscape compositions for 3D audio workstations called X-spat player, developed by A&G Soluzioni Digitali in italy. www.midorihirano.com Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.