Haco has received recognition internationally as the founder, singer, lyricist and composer of the legendary avant-pop group, After Dinner, one of the first Japanese indie bands to tour abroad and to receive the unanimous praise of music publications such as NME and Melody Maker in the 1980s. Since 1987, she has been invited to appear in numerous experimental music and art festivals in Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand, and has toured internationally almost every year. Haco is also a female visionary producer who has made field recording environmental sounds from daily life and used them as materials in her composing, programming, and mixing.
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RMSG 026CD
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On Nova Naturo, Japan's Haco expands her already divergent song craft into a zone that meshes field recording, electronics and layers of floating voice into an imagined sound environment that encourages a sense of a deepened interior terrain. Haco's work in groups including the now legendary After Dinner and Hoahio have earned her a unique and respected position in the Japanese music communities, but it is with her solo work that she has unlocked an utterly unique and deeply personal approach to sound. Drawing inspiration from mythologies surrounding ideas of rebirth, Nova Naturo propagates a sense of ambience, but arrives at this sensation without dwelling in the aesthetics of ambient music. Rather, Haco combines unexpected elements, and uses these combinations to refocus your ears and invites you to listen closely, but with a sense of relaxation. This record is not a labor and instead suggests a kind of release from labor, an opening out into place, into the human experience of exploration and the rewards that come to those present in the moment. Haco works alongside the French improvised guitarist Manuel Adnot, the drummer and pianist Tetsuji Matsuo, and the double bassist Makoto Inada, who are based in Kobe. Also on this record is Stabilo (Speaker Gain Teardrop) from the Hiroshima ambient scene, and Tarnovski (Gurun Gurun), a key figure in Czech experimental-electro music, who were previously involved in her album, Qoosui (RMSG 016CD, 2017). There is also a collaborative track with the electronic music maestro Keiichi Sugimoto (Vegpher). These partnerships resolve wholly into this recording, bringing new timbres and threads to an edition that is entirely of Haco's making. This is a music of immense beauty, but it is a beauty that is complex and at times unfamiliar. It's in these uncertain moments that Nova Naturo finds its most compelling and fulfilling resolutions.
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RMSG 016CD
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David Toop on Haco's Qoosui: "Weightless, not so much a voice from heaven but a voice that swirls in liquidity, water spirit, a world and a time in which humans, plants, animals and weather could communicate in multiple tongues through the barriers that separate living entities, the world of Apitchatpong Weerasthakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010), in which a catfish with erotic powers speaks to a princess, a world in which spirits could be heard whispering in forest glades, in spider's webs and waterfalls, from the hidden places of bright tiled rooms filled with emptiness and the yellow fizzing of neon strips. Henry J. Farny painted 'The Song of the Talking Wire' in 1904: a Lakota Sioux hunter stops in the snow, pressing his ear to a telegraph pole to listen to the humming of its wires. For his model, Farny sketched a religious man named Long Day or Long Dog, who spoke about hearing spirit voices over the wires, an experience he then used to bolster his claims to being a spiritual leader. One hundred years later, Haco listened through contact microphones to the spirit voices inaudibly (to unaided human perception) emanating from CD-R drives, mobile phones, wireless routers and similar sources of electromagnetic waves, enacting the cyborgian reworking of nature and culture of Donna J. Haraway's A Cyborg Manifesto (1984). 'Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves,' Haraway wrote. 'This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia.' The siren song is weightless, blissful, but also flightless -- always connected to the body whose aurality must be blocked to survive its seduction..."
Haco has received recognition internationally as the founder, singer, lyricist, and composer of the legendary avant-pop group, After Dinner, one of the first Japanese indie bands to tour abroad and to receive the unanimous praise in the 1980s. Hailed as one of the first female proponents of onkyo, Haco has made field recording environmental sounds from daily life and used them as materials in her composing, programming, and mixing. "A founding member of the legendary band After Dinner, Haco is one of the most versatile vocalists in the Japanese indie scene." --John Zorn
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DET 22
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"Released jointly with ReR, this is a remix of the Japan-only release of Happiness Proof which came out in 1999. Artwork is similar, but jacket is completely different. Large folded 4 color sheet inside contains lyrics both in Japanese and English. Haco was one of the originators of indie music and continues today to produce intricate compositions. This group of compositions is a dynamic collection with help from musicians such as Tsuyama Atsushi, Ichiraku Yoshimitsu, Peter Hollinger, Yamamoto Seiichi and Yoshihide Otomo."
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PCD 5558
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New project featuring Haco (ex-After Dinner vocalist, HOAHIO ). Japanese-only release. Features Haco on vocals, sampler, rhythm box, synthesizer, guitars, etc., plus numerous guests: Peter Hollinger (drums), Yamamoto Seiichi (guitar), Pierre Bastien and his Mecanium (African drums, violins, African Harp), Uchihashi Kazuhisa (guitar), Otomo Yoshihide (turntables), a number of others. A wide variety of pop and non-pop based constructions from one of the leading figures of the Japanese underground for the past 2 decades.
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