Hosaka Akane

Akane Hosaka's lounge rhythm and deliciously retro melodies hook you into a universe of gleeful wallabies, little drummer boy monkeys and motley robots. Think Yellow Magic Orchestra reworked by Jacno, a Web 2.0 style 21st century reference to the sixties precursors of electro.

Strangely, images are the initial source of Akane Hosaka's musical inspiration. Landscape, exhibitions and children's books; images that become emotions evoke the music she then transcribes. She is particularly sensitive to the graphic forms and architectural fantasy of artists such as Keiji Ito, Archigram and Bruno Munari. And just try questioning her on the stop-motion films of sixties and seventies France! It takes a true expert to catch her unaware on the fictional teddy bear Colargol (also known as Barnaby or Jeremy the Bear in the English-speaking world), the children's TV program The Magic Roundabout and the stop-motion series Chapi Chapo.

Does that seem overly nostalgic? Akane Hosaka was simply born in another space/time continuum and has a penchant for the glory years, when artists with unlimited imagination cleared whole expanses of creative ground. The same goes for her musical influences: Raymond Scott, Perrey & Kingsley and Dick Hyman rank high, but pretty much anything relating to the golden age of analogue synthesizers gets a ticket to her heart. Akane Hosaka has taken this stuff in, processed it and is now turning it out in an interpretation of her current cosmology.

Akane Hosaka is a naturally reserved performer, and her concerts are rare, precious and sometimes destabilizing because of the contrast between the playful music and the austerity of her onstage persona. But here is a perfectionist, a sort of blacksmith in the smithy, most at ease honing her electronic compositions in the studio. She says, "Making sound has been my all consuming passion since I was a kid, and I think about little else. Composition has become second nature for me." She shuns strict labeling of her music, resisting being categorised as "electronic pop" and preferring to allow her imagination free rein.