Female Duo

After our successful female duo concert in January, we would like to continue this series in a completely different location and present more female musicians in this intimate format. This time we invited two Japanese musicians, both in different musical fields.
This is where the traditional Japanese instrumentation of Naoko Kikuchi meets the electronic instrumentation of Mieko Suzuki; Playing styles of traditional and new music, on sounds from the electronic and club scene.

• Naoko Kikuchi (Koto)
• Mieko Suzuki (DJ)

Naoko Kikuchi (Koto)
was born in Sendai, Japan and has lived in Frankfurt am Main, Germany since 2007. She learned to play the koto from her mother and grandmother in her early childhood. She took lessons from Tadao Sawai and Kazue Sawai. She is a multiple prize winner of various competitions (Nagatani Kengyo Memorial Competition for Japanese Traditional Music Award for Outstanding Achievement in 2006). In 2007 she received a one-year scholarship from the Agency of Cultural Affairs of Japan and came to Frankfurt, where she studied contemporary ensemble music at the IEMA (Internationale Ensemble Modern Akademie). Since then she has been active in Germany.

Her repertoire includes not only classical but also modern koto music. She is a versatile artist who participates in a wide variety of projects, such as "On the road in international Berlin" a project of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra(2012), and also in the new edition of "Barcelona special Edition" by Freddie Mercury & Montserrat Caballé, and also in the world premiere of a ballet opera by composer Adriana Hölszky at the Ballet Oper am Rhein (2014,2017-18). In 2022, Naoko performed the Koto Concerto with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra at the Bregenzfestspiele in Austria.
www.naokokikuchi.com

Mieko Suzuki (DJ)
is a sound artist and composer born in Hiroshima and based in Berlin. Grounded in hauling deep bass, her sound performances combine drones and field recordings with the crackling of electrical circuits and fragments of vinyl records. Her experimental approach always pays careful attention to the space and to the people, whether it be a basement club, a theater play or a dance performance. Choreographer Meg Stuart, theatre director Johan Simons and avantgarde techno label Raster are among her regular creative collaborators.

Mieko Suzuki is a member of the improvisation trio Contagious together with Andrea Neumann and Sabine Erkelenz. Their first album Contagious was released by Morphine Records in 2019. Since 2009, she has been running her own bi-monthly, multidisciplinary event Kookoo, together with Arno Raffeiner, at OHM gallery in Berlin.
https://media-loca.com/mieko-suzuki/