Japanese legendary, classically-trained percussionist and environmental musician Midori Takada is known for her deeply spiritual, minimalist performances, where virtuoso technique, acoustic sensibility, spoken word, and movement combine in a unique live experience. She studied drumming in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire and Gamelan music of Indonesia, and composed works that incorporated the structures of traditional music. Her landmark album Through The Looking Glass (RCA, 1983) is considered an essential recording of minimalist music, corresponding with ambient and Fourth World musics explored by Jon Hassell and Brian Eno, but with a distinctly Japanese ceremonial and meditative musical sensibility. She created soundscapes for the Art Institute of Chicago and the Victoria & Albert Museum in the United Kingdom.
Takada began her collaborative work with Danish guitarist Jakob Bro, who is a generation younger but a frequent visitor to Japan and nearly fluent in Japanese, with a 2022 commission by Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, resulting in two improvised concerts in Berlin and Copenhagen. These encounters also led to meeting Nordic greats such as Palle Mikkelborg, Marilyn Mazur, Nils Petter Molvær, Jesper Zeuthen, and German Anja Lechner. Bro was inspired by the way Takada creates a certain space for each sound, and she liked the way Bro offers a space in which she can stretch her sounds.
あなたに出会うまで / Until I Met You is the debut album of Bro and Takada, recorded at Avaco Studio in Tokyo in October 2024. The album’s title, taken from Takada’s opening piece, refers to the spiritual bond that arises in every new friendship, whether in music or in life. Takada plays the grand piano, marimba, and various percussion instruments, and Bro plays only the acoustic guitar.
The album offers seven short, dreamlike pieces that find their profound and rare beauty by simply letting go. Takada and Bro sound like true soulmates who have created organic, egoless, and spiritual language that immediately evokes deep feelings with minimalist, supposedly simple, and almost transparent, resonant sounds and a few, concise, and precise melodic musical gestures. Takada’s «A Brief Rest of Sisyphos» best captures the dreamlike quality of this album. Bro’s «Landscape II, Simplicity» and Bro and Takada’s last «Floating Forest» sound like enigmatic rituals with powerful healing effects. Other pieces like Bro’s «Infinity» and «Sparkles» sound like songs that you may believe that you already sang in a previous life.
In a way, あなたに出会うまで / Until I Met You suggests a magical, poetic sonic ecosystem, compassionate, moving, and life-affirming, transcending musical and cultural backgrounds and age differences. It lasts only 35 minutes, but it guarantees that its listeners will treasure every musical gesture of it.
Eyal Hareuveni
Midori Takada (percussion, piano, marimba), Jakob Bro (acoustic guitar)
