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Ayami Suzuki is a Tokyo-based musician, artist and improviser. Her practice revolves around creating site-specific ambient soundscapes that incorporate her folk influences in a synthesis of songwriting and improvisation. Since returning to Tokyo in 2019 after several years of studies in Ireland and the UK, she has become an active performer, collaborator and solo artist. Her recent releases for Lontano Series, Healing Sound Propagandist, Ftarri and Cosima Pitz showcase her singular approach to vocal ambient music, often fusing her ethereal vocals with environmental sounds in a way that feels formless, immersive and expansive all at once.
Artist notes:
This piece is a live recording of a performance at the event Silent Shadow Vol. 7, which took place on 22 October 2022 at the venue Nanahari in Tokyo. Using my voice as the primary instrument, I navigated through various effects and equipment, transforming into different beings, elements and phenomena. Detached from my body by loops, they wandered autonomously through the space, forming their own ecosystem. I tried to circulate them and sometimes to touch their stories.
Maybe it’s because I used to dance a lot when I was a teenager, but when I listen to music, I feel as if it resonates throughout my entire body. But after a while, when I become deeply immersed in the sound, I lose the awareness that I am listening to it. The boundaries between my senses become blurred and my body becomes like an afterimage of a flame flickering in the wind of sound in the darkness.
Mastered by Simon Scott at SPS Mastering.
Tokyo’s Ayami Suzuki makes ambient Celtic music, believe it or not, sounding like a cross between Enya and Steve Roach.
Back in 2014, Suzuki started playing Celtic ballads in her home city of Tokyo, and by 2016 she had relocated to Ireland to develop her craft. Now back home after a spell at Goldsmiths, she uses vocal loops and guitar to make billowing ambient compositions that sit on top of her Celtic folk foundations. ‘Strands’ is a live recording of a performance from 2022 at Tokyo’s Nanahari, and pipes her voice through an array of effects, blurring it into windy drones and time-stretched vocalizations. If you can imagine an Enya record granulated and slowed down a few hundred percent – Florian T M Zeisig’s ‘You Look So Serious’, basically – then you’ll have a good idea of where this one’s going.
But mid-way through the 30-minute piece, Suzuki’s vocals disappear completely, replaced by surges of electrical noise and feedback. When her voice returns, it’s encased in white noise that slowly fades into thick, powerful organ drones. Lovely stuff – another good ‘un on Longform Editions.
(Review by Boomkat)
