Ayuo.net

Music composed by Ayuo
Performed by:
Ayuo: Acoustic Guitar, Irish Harp, Psaltery
Yoko Ueno: Accordion, Vocals
Minako Kobayashi: Percussion

The three of us performed this music, each night live in the theatre for about three months. In 2007, some music from this play became the theme for a special News documentary program on television in Japan.

1) Lost Animals
Ayuo: Acoustic Guitar, Electric Guitar, Glissando Guitar, Psaltery, Bird Whistles, Strings, Drum Percusion, Vocals

2) The Garden of our Childhood
Ayuo: Psaltery, Irish Harp

Jaco is a Sephardic song from what was once the large Spanish speaking Jewish community in Salonika in Greece. Although there are many Sephardic songs which were based on songs derived from Medieval and Renaissance Spain, Jaco is based on a traditional Greek Rembetika song. The music is very similar to “My Elenista” or Your two fair eyes”, sung by Roza Eskenazi, a star in Greek Rembetika.
I play a 3-course Bouzouki that I bought in Athens in 1994. The vocals are by Sara Yoko Benito, and members of my band, Ayuo Trio, who played in many of the tracks in my solo albums “Eurasian Journey” and “Earth Guitar”, are playing with me.

The performance reminded some listeners in the audience of “White Rabbit” and other such psychedelic songs by Jefferson Airplane. A quick listen may show you why. This song is really made for the Bouzouki.

I have always been interested in trying to create a 3D effect in music. Like a 3D picture drawn in blue and red, similar musical phrases are superimposed on top of each other. If you listen closely, the different colors of entwining modal lines may start to move.
"A Stranger" is based on a modal melody I played with Peter Knight (violinist of Steeleye Span) on my CD, "Nova Carmina".

All instruments played and recorded by Ayuo on Pro-tools:
Ayuo: Bouzouki, Sitar-Guitar, Cornemuse, Electric Guitar, Bass, Soft Synths
(Chameleon 5000, Computer Muzys (Midi sequencing), DS 404, B4, imPOScar,
Sample Tank, Dalai Lama,) Fue, Tin Whistle, Darbukka, and voice.

Ken Awazu: Low Male Chorus

A 8:30 minutes piece for the guitar showing the various styles I use, when playing in a different tuning. The guitar here is in open C9 tuning. This piece has an introduction, two instrumental sections and a song part in the middle.
I first learned to play in different tunings from listening to Joni Mitchell and Martin Carthy, when I was in junior high school.

I once had a conversation with Peter Hammill in which he told me that he raised his three children in a small town near Bath, England because he wanted to give them a solid sense of roots. He said "I never had that because my parents were moving around constantly. In this modern age, being able to grow up with the same people in the same place is important. because that way you really get to understand people. The musicians that I toured with, and that went on to tour the States all wound up with broken homes." (He was talking about members in Genesis and King Crimson.) I said " I've never had the chance of being in one place long either. Just when I turned three, I was in Berlin. I was in Stockholm, when I was four. Then from the time I turned six to when I was fifteen, I was in New York City. Sometimes, we moved to a few different places in one year. My family members kept changing  too. I've had Iranian and English step-fathers, as well as an Irish-American step-mother."  Peter: "Oh well, for me, it was all in England."

For me, the most interesting book I've read in the recent years is Matt Ridley's "Nature via Nurture", which is a book that examines the roots of human behavior. Matt Ridley is a science journalist. He writes about how our genes absorb experiences from the society we grow up in, and our immediate environment. Scientists who study genes now believe that all human beings on the earth are descended from the same group of people that originated in Tanzania in Eastern Africa. Parts of this group started to leave the African continent from 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. The differences in the environment and how each set of people coped with it made the changes in the people around the earth. But we are still 99.99% alike.
Matt Ridley also writes about Kasper Hauser. Kasper Hauser was a man who was raised in a isolated stable with almost no human contact until he was 16. He was able to learn some vocabulary by imitation, but had a problem understanding grammar. The linguist, Noam Chomsky, had discovered in the 1950’s that the ability to learn language is inherited, but the language one learns to speak is imprinted from the society they are raised in. The same goes for culture. And that there is a time limit for this imprinting, which is up to about the time you are 15. As I was raised in various places until I was 15, reading this had quite an impact on me.

Different languages are like different colors. A poem translated into a different language often sounds very different because people can only see things through the way their culture had taught them to see and feel.

Even though my biological parents are both from Japan, the cultural influences from the late 1960’s in New York City and from step parents and my classmates will always be with me. And my culture and music, as one individual, comes from the sum of all these influences.
I believe that understanding about life science will help uncover a lot about human behavior, and that this is what we need.

A guitar instrumental in open C 9/11 tuning

Ayuo: Celtic Harp, Acoustic Guitar, Psaltery, Voice
Moco: Keyboards

Ayuo: Celtic Harp, Zheng (Chinese Koto), Psaltery, Electric Sitar, Tin Whistle Mai Yamane: Vocals