The geese do not wish to leave their reflection behind;
The water has no mind to retain their image.

(quoted from Zenrinkushu by Luciana Galliano on the book "Yogaku - Percorsi della musica giapponese nel Novecento").

Tell me who you go with and I’ll tell you who you are. Keeping to this rule, it’d be too much easy to guess life and miracles of the twenty-four years old Sawako. But proverbs are just simple common places and Sawako is Japanese, from Nagoya and so she’s all but a common person. It is well known that the lack of specific traditions makes the approach of Japanese towards western music bizarre and uninhibited. I’ll give you an example: if you have listened to “Opening Sweep” by Ocsid (Graham Lewis, CM von Hausswolff, etc.) you should have noticed that from the jumble of manipulated materials a well known melody is released at a certain point; obviously it is a first-rate melody (politically correct, if you prefer) that is Jealous Guy by John Lennon. Sawako makes the same operation in one of her pieces, with the difference that the released melody is a second-rate one, scanning clearly the main theme from the soundtrack of “A man, a woman” by Claude Lelouch. But let’s take a step back, she was on the same stage with Oval, Christophe Charles, Robert Duckworth, Olivia Block... and so on. Surely there are present in her music those forms of psychedelic minimalism that characterises a certain kind of music, in fact both minimalism and psychedelia gathered ideas, forms, imagination and equilibrium in the East. For Sawako this was not lived indirectly as a simple intellectual interest or as a postcard image, but it represented her “daily bread”. From her fantasies her world appears, a world that can be found everyday in a street and in a Tokyo club or genetically acquired, like that of the major instrumental traditions related to shakuhachi or koto: in Japan, unlike in western countries, modernization has never meant deletion of their own customs. Furthermore we are talking of a world in which the game, intended in a Hessian sense, has always had a fundamental role changing everyday life deeply. So it is difficult to distinguish reality from imagination. Then there is the Zen tradition, the interpenetration of the opposites: iconographies as libro cuore and posology of a psychiatric asylum.
The comparison that I like more, to body the image of Sawako, is that of Jimi Tenor. Not because their music is similar, but for a common multimedia attitude. In fact the Japanese girl, despite her young age, has already put her hands into the most various expressive contemporary media: from visual arts, like photography and video-art, to dance; from media arts to writing. Of course passing through music. She took piano lessons and also traditional Noh theatre lessons, and during university she’s been interested in arts in general and especially in computer science. Sawako possesses all those characteristics of the little genius and her name is already often heard in the underground of the electronic free forms. And this is surprising if you consider that she hasn’t released any official record. To listen to her music it is necessary to seek some problematical compilations or surfing on some web archipelagos like that of the Aesova (USA) or that of Tu m’ (Italy). Aesowa should publish also a CD-R 3’’ and another CD-R 3’’ is due for Throat. As an alternative, it is also possible to directly contact the artist and request her self-produced CD-R. These are delicious digital handicrafts, in their classic shape or in a rectangular shape, bizarrely decorated by her hands. The latter solution is the one that we hotly recommend to the reader, so as not to wait that everybody is speaking about her. Then, if her name emerges you will have preceded all those journalists of the international musical press and in the worst case you have put your hands on some little rare jewels. Not only to be collected because there is also good music inside. A fast description can be made from her own words, that is organic electronica (oe). So it is a music created using electronic devices that are used to re-process organic materials (in particular field recordings). It is a warm electronica whose fluxes expand themselves in a psychedelic texture. A dreaming – and dreamed – music that is averse to assumptions and definitions. Spontaneous compositions that get fixed like the geese leave their reflection on the water. In the end I’d like to use a sentence by Luciano Berio taken from the introduction of the book that we have already quoted: “It is not in my intentions (and neither in my possibilities) trying to explain how, when and why in Japanese art and behaviour the meaning often is not made explicit but it is quietly inferred, thought and even unspoken. In this case I’d like to recall a fact that shocked me long time ago. It is the description of the Zengakuren (the student movement in the sixties) made by Roland Barthes in his “Empire of sings”. In Tokyo the students organized violent demonstrations bearing very few leaflets that didn’t explain the reasons of their spectacular ‘choreographies’. They just announced only the fact of being protesting students.”