Couples doing stuff together is a horrible prospect. The possibilities for the twee, the smug, the self-regarding, some profound lack of aesthetic objectivity and the likelihood of a horrible public folie a deux are painfully high.
Nonetheless we now have a blog where we’ll be posting ongoing revisions to the music we are making*. It’s inevitably influenced no doubt by the fact that Ayako is Japanese, or more especially Okinawan, or more microscopically from Miyako Jima, that I am English, from Barrow-in Furness, by a whole host of differences, similarities, tensions and overlaps, age, nationality gender, all that stuff. Also by the fact that we have lived in each others' countries, that one of us speaks the other’s language, that I have moved from complete indifference to and ignorance of Japanese culture and history to having found my own sets of interests and engagements with it.
As we went along we made certain decisions about what we didn't want to do, nothing dark or edgy, no bass, no beats, no ambient, no drone. We are a bit bored of the doomy, we are also a bit bored of the self-consciously avant-garde, the cool, the now, the Post.
I think we wanted some kind of music whose function was to fortify Utopian desire, our own, and others.**
Obviously, like Utopia itself, it’s a work in progress.
*when I say “music we are making” I should again emphasise I haven’t made any of it. I have just offered suggestions
** without getting all "3D-Printers!" about it.
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