Mayumi Miyata

the Sho
I started off doing the Shinto thing, then from that i found the Sho : the instrument. It’s like sort of a Japanese mouth organ, it looks like a sort of beehive, is that the one ? Yeah, and it’s basically a set of seventeen pipes from bamboo that can only be picked from a roof that’s been above a kitchen for one hundred years. Something about the type of moisture in the wood. And then they pick seventeen pipes and they place them in the shape of the wings of a phoenix bird. So the length of the pipes goes purely by aesthetics, so it’s got nothing to with what notes you need. But actually two of them don’t work, because some emperor didn’t like them. So you’ve got actually fifteen notes that cover two octaves, but it’s kind of random which notes are missing. So you’ve sort of got...

BBC Radio 3, Mixing It, 5 august 2005

the Sho
It’s a very peculiar instrument, because it only has 15 notes. It’s very tricky to play, and for purely aesthetic reasons, it’s shaped a bit like your hands if you put them like this [makes praying gesture] . It fits in with the ’restraint’ theme of the album title very nicely, actually. After I met Mayumi, I had about two months to write for her. So it was a lot of research, a lot of Google. Did she have a go on the sho herself ? Well, I asked Mayumi, but she looked at me like, are you kidding ? There is no fucking way you are gonna be able to play this. Full respect, though : it’s very personal and part of a unique tradition.

The independant, July 15 2005

the Sho
I just took the train out to Montauk on my own and sat there in a hotel and wrote the sho pieces in the space of a week. She then recruited the instrument’s virtuoso, Mayumi Miyata, to perform them. I listened to everything she had done, and it encouraged me to do the opposite. I was wary of the Japanese stereotypes, and I didn’t want it to sound like some New Age meditation CD.

New York Magazine , November 28, 2005 issue