Then came The Shed Record, released around the same time on the Scottish label Diskono, which triggered my fascination with the artist. Its cover featured a drawing of a house modestly at the center of a beautifully simple blue-green paper jacket. There were no song titles or credits—just a collection of playful drawings depicting cars, bowling balls, books, light bulbs, and other objects scattered across the page like riddles. Each doodle was numbered, serving as an abstract track list that suggested the content and mood of each piece. This alone sparked my imagination and filled me with excitement.

The album captured the essence of Aeron’s home in Clarkston, Michigan—the time spent there with family, friends, and loves. As if you are standing on the porch on a sunny morning, you can hear the birds around you, and a repairman working in the distance. The day just begins there. It was a deeply personal record of everyday life, but the album also has a sense of un-reality by adding with subtle delicate electronic sounds. These sounds were built from short, repeating loops, which transformed simple recordings of daily life into music. The album didn't just document moments—it elevated them. The moment when the record of daily life is transformed into music. Through this, the voices of loved ones became music, and even the smallest actions felt like part of a larger composition. I found that I had already melted into a part of the story.

This realization struck me deeply. The album was not just a record of life but an acknowledgment of the impossibility of truly capturing reality. Field recording, by its nature, is never an objective document of the world—it is always shaped by the perspective of the artist. This work was a deeply personal sound narrative, built on the artist’s perception of the world. The combination of everyday beauty with a subtle but critical perspective gave it immense strength. It was inspiring to see that one could create such a compelling piece without formal musical training, with only unique ideas and a critical eye toward the world.

At the time, the internet was still in its infancy, and I didn’t even own a computer, so my only way of learning about the music was through the credits printed on the CDs I bought. That’s how I learned that Aeron Bergman also co-ran a label called Lucky Kitchen with Alejandra Salinas and Daniel Raffel, a label whose releases I began spotting everywhere—Kurara Audio Arts in Shibuya, the 5th floor of Tower Records Shibuya (where Koichi Matsunaga, a member of ADS and Smurf Otoko-gumi, and known for his work as COMPUMA, was the buyer), and the Avant-Pop section on the 9th floor of the Shinjuku store. At the time, Tower Records stocked surprisingly obscure releases, including CD-Rs from small independent labels overseas.

One Lucky Kitchen find was The Children’s Record by Alejandra & Underwood (I later learned that Underwood was also Aeron). The album jacket was crafted from unsold remnants of pink construction paper stock, seemingly found in an old art supply store. Its cover featured a charming wooden horse, alongside an arithmetic book for toddlers. Inside, a card was tucked between the pages—a handwritten note bearing the artists’ names and album title. It was obviously a lovely handmade limited-edition, and when I found it, I bought it immediately, not wanting to miss out. Years later, I found another copy of the same album, but this time, the card was different. Instead of the wooden horse, it featured a math problem card with an illustration of a knife and an axe. Each detail seemed intentional, reinforcing the personal and handcrafted nature of the release.

The Children’s Record wasn’t a documentary-style field recording of a place or culture, nor was it an academic study of phenomenon. Instead, it was an exploration of memory itself. The artists asked friends to sing songs they remembered from their childhoods (including Daniel Raffel, who co-founded Lucky Kitchen in New York). The album was filled with rhythmic short loops that were sampled from sources such as a VHS recording of a children's TV show theme, a phone recording of someone singing the theme to Kure Kure Takora (!), nostalgic childhood songs, half-remembered melodies hummed absentmindedly, children's folk songs from foreign lands, the cheerful voices of kids playing in a park, and gentle electronic loops resembling lullabies. They transformed individual memories into sounds that resonated across different times and places. This was the magic of Alejandra & Aeron’s music.

Looking at the album credits, I saw that collaborators included many of their friends: Kid 606, V/VM, To Rococo Rot and I-Sound, Sachiko M, Leaf, as well as Todd A. Carter (Aerospace Soundwise), who was a pioneer in using real-time computer software for live performances. These were all artists who approached computer music with a critical and radical perspective.

In the late 1990’s, the rapid evolution of computers—spurred by Apple’s affordable, portable PowerBook G3—made laptop ownership accessible to the masses. Coupled with breakthroughs in software like Cycling ‘74’s Max/MSP, which made it possible to manipulate digital audio signals in real time, electronic music production became as personal and adaptable as folk music. This democratization sparked a global boom in computer-based electronic music, but it also led to a wave of formulaic, commercialized trends in the scene. Against this backdrop, Lucky Kitchen’s label activities and productions stood out for their refreshingly intimate and idyllic, almost pastoral approach to technology—blending DIY aesthetics with criticality. Instead of simply embracing digital tools, they used them to tell deeply personal and emotionally resonant stories.

Moreover, Alejandra & Aeron pioneered the revival of “field recording” as an artistic practice. While the term may seem commonplace today, and environmental and quotidian sounds had long been recorded, their approach went beyond mere documentation. Instead, they treated environmental sounds as cherished artistic material, weaving it into deeply personal compositions. In 2001, this technique of elevating field recordings into artistic narratives resonated widely, becoming a profound influence on countless artists of the era.

In 2001, Lucky Kitchen released a work that would prove to be a definitive record of this: Folklore Volume One: La Rioja by Alejandra & Aeron. Packaged in an envelope and covered with Tyrolean tape-like cloth depicting rural scenes, this album is a collection of sound recordings from Alejandra Salinas' hometown in La Rioja, northern Spain, where they lived at the time. It captured the rustic atmosphere of the mountainous region: traditional work songs, the sound of sheep bells, songs drifting from homes, and recordings of local festivals. However, as expressed in their liner notes, their aim was "not to pin down a dead butterfly, but to paint one in flight." Moreover, they emphasized that this was not an academic study of regional folk music, but rather folklore captured through their own perspective—a living, vibrant soundscape of the region.

The album includes not only their recordings, but also old home recordings made by locals. For example, one of Alejandra’s grandmother’s tapes from 30 years earlier features a pattern of feedback noise caused by her repeated failures to use the microphone and recorder. They describe this as “terrifyingly beautiful.” Here, the struggle to adapt to new technology is preserved in sound, and the accidental electronic noise, they argue, paints a richer picture of social life in that moment. In fact, some tracks foreground this feedback noise over the actual ambient sounds. Similarly, recordings of villagers singing folk songs at a festival are often dominated by the crackling noise of tape distortion, louder than the singing itself—until, after a while, that crackling begins to sound like a soothing electronic tone. Rejecting polished folk music concerts already mediated by a PA system—which creates a gap between the musicians and the audience—Alejandra & Aeron prefer to capture the acoustic rehearsal, prizing “a vivid, living sound.” The liner notes critically and objectively examine how the local people engage with traditional folk music, and the album presents not just documentation but their own perspective on La Rioja’s folklore.

Recording requires a microphone, which converts air vibrations into electrical signals. The signal, once converted by this technological intervention, is a manipulated sound within the audible range, and the presence of space is lost. The physical presence of the microphone and the arbitrary act of pointing it at a subject always involve a subjective element—how we choose to perceive the world. Alejandra & Aeron use field recordings to tell personal stories and histories. The transformation into audible sound brings with it a loss and alteration of meaning, but it is precisely this gap that allows new narratives to emerge. Through electronics as a medium, Alejandra & Aeron created their own unique context for folk music.

Haunted Folklore One: Ruinas Encantadas was released at the same time with a matching jacket design. Described as “ghost folklore” the album featured tracks combining glitch-like loops mimicking paranormal phenomena with high-frequency drones, pushing their identity as electronic musicians to the forefront. Here, field recordings were almost completely relegated to the background, except for a few exceptions. Each sound had an intriguing hook, interspersed with strange humming and occasionally ear-splitting high-pitched sounds. Each track resembled story chapters, the ghosts here felt like familiar characters from a book, imbued with warmth.

At the time, CDs were the primary music medium, and standard plastic jewel cases were the norm. However, as digipaks—cardstock bases with plastic trays for CDs—began spreading from the U.S., the intimate charm of paper sleeves gained traction. Still, pre-2000, producing CDs was prohibitively expensive, and independent musicians like myself typically stuck to cassettes. As CD pressing costs later dropped, more individuals began launching CD labels.

Amidst this shift, Lucky Kitchen further reduced costs by separating CD pressing and jacket production, personally visiting local paper wholesalers and print studios to select vintage paper and inks, and even crediting the print shops on some albums. Though their packaging was handmade, they avoided both the exclusivity of one-off limited editions and generic mass-production of commonplace CD products. Instead, they struck a middle ground with cohesive designs for uniquely crafted paper packaging—a reflection of the label’s philosophy that harmonized perfectly with the music itself. Incidentally, after 2000, independent music publishing shifted from cassette tapes to CD-Rs, and I began to see many packages and designs clearly influenced by Lucky Kitchen and similar indie labels.

As for me around that time—every time I visited LOS APSON? I’d make and deliver new cassette tapes. Eventually, the owner, Keiji Yamabe, suggested: “Have you ever sent demo tapes to any labels? Your stuff would fit perfectly with Lucky Kitchen’s vibe, why not try sending them?” Imagining my work stocked at my favorite record store felt like a dream come true (honestly, it still does). I had never considered sending my demos to labels, but Lucky Kitchen, as I have mentioned, was the ideal label for me, so I decided to give it a shot.

But where was the label from? Though promoted as Spanish, their CD credits showed recordings done in New York, Toronto, London, and elsewhere. I decided to email the address listed on their latest release. Since I didn’t own a computer back then, I eagerly went to a university computer lab and sent them an email using a student email address (Alejandra & Aeron were the first people I ever emailed!). My email said something along the lines of, “I have a CD I want from Lucky Kitchen, how can I order it? I’m making music myself, and I’d love for you to listen to my tapes.” A few days later, when I checked my email again at the computer class, I received a reply! It seemed they were still living in La Rioja, Spain. Nervously, I mailed them four cassette tapes I had been working on. A few weeks later, I received a package from them containing a Lucky Kitchen CD (Goodbye If You Call That Gone by A.F.R.I. Studios), a dinosaur footprint pin badge (I later learned that La Rioja is famous for being the place where dinosaur footprint fossils were discovered) and an offer to release my music through their label!

But it was a long road from there to the release of the album. First, they asked me to send a DAT master. DAT (Digital Audio Tape) a tape format compatible with high-density digital data, was then the standard to transfer master audio data for CD pressing. Of course, I didn’t have anything like that, so all I could do was tell them I didn’t have one.

It was my first time making a CD, and there was no one around who I could consult about such things. After that, I received a message from them asking if I could instead copy the data onto a CD-R and send it. But since I was only sending emails from my school’s computer lab, I had absolutely no idea how to copy data to a CD-R. Communication stalled for a while, and I remained stuck in a state of helplessness for about a year. It wasn’t until 2022 that I finally got my own computer that happened to come with a CD-R drive, so I was at last able to create the master data and send it to them.

But even the crucial task of selecting the songs took time. None of the tape works I had made had proper titles, which made it difficult to confirm via mail which tracks they wanted versus the ones I had selected. As I mentioned, my English was hopeless, and I had to rely almost entirely on translation websites. At the time, I used Excite Translate, which had just launched, but the accuracy was comically inaccurate, and I struggled immensely. My fear of English was so strong, that I rejected the better option of email exchanges, and instead defaulted to mailing multiple CD-R to Spain, which of course, it was not faster.

For the artwork—we had already decided to use a painting by the artist Saiko Kimura— but I didn’t own a proper camera to take a picture of it and send it to them. Despite having studied photography at university, my only camera was an Olympus Pen half-frame, and I had no idea how to take a good quality photo to send. After consulting with Saiko Kimura, I decided to send the artwork itself by mail, which ended up costing me more money and time.

Anyway, two years slipped because I was utterly clueless about everything, and my stubborn tendency to procrastinate until I was fully satisfied with what I was doing.

In the meantime, Lucky Kitchen, gaining momentum, launched the Sparkling Composers Series. Among them was Monologue with Accompaniment by Chicago’s Todd Carter, under the alias Aerospace Soundwise, who had been active in TV Pow alongside pioneers of laptop-based electronic music like Michael Hartman and Brent Gutzeit. The CD came packaged with included a mysterious sponge puzzle. Then there was Busride Interview, the first solo album by double bassist Joshua Abrams, known for his work in hip-hop group The Roots, and in the serene chamber ensemble Town and Country.

Other releases during this period included Pieces of Air by Toshiya Tsunoda, a monumental masterpiece of field recordings capturing the essence of specific locations. Tsunoda worked with the conceptual production collective WrK with artists such as Minoru Sato and Jio Shimizu—a group focused on exploring “phenomena and events unfolding in time and space and shifting nature of our own perceptions and attitudes towards them.”

Further releases included Humming Bird Feeder Ver 0.2, a collaborative work by New York experimental heavyweights Tetsu Inouye, Stephen Vitiello, and Andrew Deutsch; Die Entdeckung Des Wetters, a lush drone classic by Germany's Stephan Mathieu, which would influence countless subsequent artists; and the intricately designed, semi-transparent cover containing the bizarre Labortag by Germany’s Thom Kubli—known for his art-world acclaim with Black Hole Horizon, a work that manipulated soap bubbles through sound.

Lastly, there was Drawing Speed, Coloring Time by Toshiyuki Kobayashi, a London-based visual artist who had met Alejandra & Aeron by chance.

All these works were released between 2001 and 2003, a time when I was being so sluggish. I'll stop here because it would take forever to list the label's works, but I later met many of the musicians mentioned above. I already knew Toshiya Tsunoda since I’d been a fan of WrK since my teens. I met Joshua Abrams when he came to see me when I performed in Chicago with Liz Payne, of Town and Country, during my 2011 U.S. tour. Andrew Deutsch released many self-produced CD-Rs, and before I knew it we’d become kind of friends who exchanged recordings. I performed at a festival in Nantes, France in 2018 where Thom Kubli also performed. I shared a stage with Stephan Mathieu during his 2014 Japan performance. As for Toshiyuki Kobayashi—his girlfriend at the time turned out to be my sister’s best friend—a bizarre coincidence!

After that I met Norwegian Alexander Rishaug who with Lasse Marhaug collaborated on the album Feel Free At Home. We later organized each other’s shows not only in Japan and Norway, but also in Berlin. I also toured with Liz Payne of Town and Country and The Zoo Wheel and Joseba Irazoki of DO, both of whom would release albums with Lucky Kitchen. These encounters with my “label mates” felt like relationships that Alejandra & Aeron had connected for me.

In 2003, just as my album was about to be released, I received the incredible news that Alejandra & Aeron were coming to Japan. They were invited to participate in the large-scale sound art exhibition Sounding Spaces at NTT InterCommunication Center joining legendary artists like Alvin Lucier, Christina Kubisch, and David Cunningham.

Arriving early to work on the production and installation of their piece, they reached out to me, and through email exchanges, the idea came up that they wanted to visit the Japanese countryside and perhaps go to my hometown. We arranged to meet in Tokyo first. At the time, I was living in a small, shabby 6-tatami apartment in the rural town of Aihara, a quiet area between Machida, Hachioji in Tokyo and Sagamihara. I was incredibly nervous about hosting first-time visitors from overseas in a place where hardly any of my acquaintances had ever visited.

We met at ICC, where curator Minoru Hatanaka introduced us. They were both kind, intelligent, soft-spoken individuals, who listened sincerely to my explanations and gestures without irritation despite my complete inability to speak English. We walked together along my favorite mountain path in Aihara, and then in my room we talked about music, and listened to CDs I had recently been playing.

At the time, I was listening to Trace by Sakiyo Fujimoto, a release on Sonic Plate’s sub-label which had released works by WOODMAN and Takehito Nakazato’s DUB SONIC. While we examined the CD jacket, they seemed to notice something: “The girl who did the narrative for our current work is also named Sakiyo, and she mentioned she does music too, could this be her?” I immediately assumed it was the same person, and it was! She would later form a new project called The Medium Necks, which would be the first release on the Aotoao Label I started, and we ended up working together in a band called HELLL—but that’s another story. During this period, many coincidences naturally connected.

The next day, we headed to my hometown in Ishikawa Prefecture, and stayed together at my family home in Matto City (now Hakusan City) near Kanazawa. When we stopped by the yarn-twisting factory my family was running at the time, they took out a DAT recorder and microphone and began recording despite covering their ears from the loud noise of the high-speed spindle rotation. When we visited Kenrokuen Garden, they spent time recording within the garden.

On our return journey to Tokyo, while waiting for a connection in the mountains of Niigata (this was before the Hokuriku Shinkansen opened, making the trip from Ishikawa to Tokyo time-consuming with transfers), they suddenly said they wanted to climb a mountain we'd seen from the train window, so we got off and climbed together. They again recorded ambient nature sounds while I tried not to make unnecessary noise. Even the time spent waiting remains a cherished memory that I still occasionally recall.

Later at ICC, their live, public performance of Scotch Monsters left a deep impression. The performance incorporated the audience as participants in a story about Scottish ghosts with small bells distributed to everyone in the audience. Beginning with field recordings of cowbells, delicate electronic sounds gradually intertwined. The faint, whispering tones of countless bells ringing in the audience persisted as various natural sounds, concrete noises, and instrument tones emerged and disappeared, eventually swirling into radical harsh noise electronics that disrupted the flow of time. Before we knew it, the audience had stopped ringing their bells and listened intently to the mesmerizing, lullaby-like electronic loops. This immersion into a mixed narrative world—where discomfort and pleasantness coexisted without conflict—mirrored the brilliance I’d felt from their exhibition piece. While their audio works had already demonstrated this, witnessing their live performance confirmed beyond doubt that they were truly exceptional musicians and performers.

Thanks to the large number of artists participating in the Sounding Spaces exhibition coming to Japan, I had the chance to experience many other valuable live performances and talks. Experiencing Alvin Lucier’s talk and concert program twice—at ICC and the Kawasaki City Museum—became extremely significant nourishment for me. The performance of his piece Fan for 4 Kotos sounded completely different in each space, and performances of his pieces such as Opera with Objects, and Bird and Person Dyning remain vividly etched in my memory. While there was no live performance, Christina Kubisch described works I’d only vaguely known before, which was wonderful. Needless to say, her installation creating a sonic jungle at ICC through radio waves was magnificent, and Lucier’s Empty Vessels was beautiful too. Also unexpectedly stimulating was Rafael Toral's minimal concert using two oscillators to interfere with electronic sounds - which if you didn't know better might almost resemble a séance (?) (and wait - that wasn't guitar!).

After the exhibition, Alejandra & Aeron’s Japan Tour was organized by HEADZ in Tokyo and BusRatch and Parallax Records in Kyoto. Their performances drew large crowds, as at ICC, and the energy at all venues was high, showing how much attention they commanded at the time.

Through an invitation from Tetsuro Yasunaga and Sugimoto of minamo (who also performed at the Tokyo show), I have fond memories of going out to eat with Alejandra & Aeron along with exhibition participants Taylor Deupree of 12k and Richard Chartier of LINE, and attending a fireworks festival in Chofu together. Incidentally, during that dinner, Alejandra & Aeron joked that ASUNA's emails—probably because they used translation software—were always hilariously garbled, with their imperfections perfectly capturing the frustrations of computer-mediated communication (though at the time I was genuinely mortified about this).

After the exhibition wrapped up, Alejandra & Aeron returned to Barcelona, where they had just moved. Despite having almost no prior live performance experience, I was suddenly chosen as the opening act for Phil Niblock’s Japan tour simply for being a Japanese artist releasing on Lucky Kitchen. This marked a turning point in my musical activities which had previously been confined to recordings.

Then in September of the same year, ASUNA's debut album Organ Leaf was finally released. It’s hard to believe now, but the first pressing sold out immediately, and to my surprise, a second pressing followed (it was even reissued by HEADZ in 2018). Riding this momentum, Lucky Kitchen released a continuous stream of new works: Jason Ajemian's Chicago jazz collective Who Cares How Long You Sink (featuring Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker), solo works by Chicago percussionist Tim Daisy, and releases by formidable musicians like New York guitarist Mary Halvorson and violinist Jessica Pavone. Meanwhile, the compilation Audiolab included artists straddling music and visual art like David Toop, Monolake, and Steve Roden alongside contemporary visual artists such as Doug Aitken, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Cameron Jamie, and Xavier Veilhan.

As Alejandra & Aeron, they released Bousha Blue Blazes through Kit Clayton's Orthlorng Musork in late 2003 - a work based on their conversations and musical improvisations with Aeron’s grandmother Elaine Ruth Fox. Interwoven performances with computer and acoustic instruments like guitar and piano revealed a new stylistic direction while maintaining their signature unhurried pace.

Reflecting on works connected to family memories, one must mention Alejandra's solo 10" vinyl album Home Tapes, released in Lucky Kitchen's early days. This captures 9-year-old (!) Alejandra recording her solitary musings on tape when stomachaches kept her bedridden - describing her living room, pretending to be an interviewer asking her parents about their favorite TV shows, and preserving her pure perspective and naive questions. The act of casting honest attention on subjects seems simple yet proves surprisingly difficult. But these very inquiries become methods for comprehending the world from alternate angles - an attitude consistently carried through to their current practice.

In 2004, during an extended residency at Portugal's Serralves Contemporary Art Museum (Fundação de Serralves), they created Porto (released in 2005) as the second installment in their aforementioned Folklore series. Crucially, this field recording work avoids typical ethnographic sound-collecting approaches; instead, it captures through their personal lens those moments when local folklore and cultural practices pulse through contemporary daily life, transformed into a singular musical work.

The rhythmic snipping sounds of barber scissors, grandmothers chatting and singing in communal laundry areas, the whirring of fishermen's reels along the coast, the sharpening of knives at the market, that night when Portugal defeated England in soccer—unable to sleep through the blaring car horns and festive clamor until dawn, they finally gave up and decided to go out drinking at 3 AM themselves—along with numerous recordings of local festivals and events. Yet in every scene, you can distinctly sense these are sounds captured by their own microphones intentionally pointed toward these moments.

The ambient noises recorded out of pure curiosity and the stories of interactions with locals consist precisely of what would be overlooked by academically motivated documentation—and it's exactly this quality that gives their work its distinctive power. The liner notes contain detailed narratives for each track (while also serving as valuable geographical and ethnographic records of Porto as a city), allowing listeners to conjure vivid scenes through their stories while reading along.

Another work released around the same time, Be Mine, originated from interviews Alejandra & Aeron conducted during Berlin’s Mobile Academy - an art project by artist Hannah Hurtzig that gathered specialists across fields for knowledge-sharing events. They asked participants about "things they love" then electronically processed related sound materials and combined them with each speaker's monologues. The first track surprisingly features an interview with Anne Laplantine! Here, rather than their own narratives, they wove an album by accompanying this universal sentiment expressed through multiple perspectives with music. This marked a shift toward works more actively engaging with social contexts.

As evident from their work in Portugal, they began receiving invitations worldwide. Consequently, Lucky Kitchen's label activities gradually slowed, ceasing entirely after DO's second album Pertsona in 2007. Their own musical output also concluded with Billowy Mass on Sweden's Kning Disk that same year (aside from a 2008 contribution to Three Ideophones 10” pictograph box set with Goodiepal and Jorg Piringer on Dutch press Onomatopee in 2008.) I later learned they had relocated from Spain to Norway for art university professorships around this time. Regardless, their creative focus shifted decisively from music to art projects.

Personally, I’d reached mental and financial limits in Tokyo around then. Even when overseas offers for releases and gigs came in after Organ Leaf was released, my English email phobia grew so severe I avoided even translation tools—eventually perceiving English text blurred into abstract patterns—losing touch with many of my contacts, including Alejandra & Aeron.

However, in 2011, while touring the U.S. with The Medium Necks and Chicago percussionist Charles Rumback, our Detroit lodging turned out to be an artist residency co-founded by Alejandra & Aeron. Our organizer Joel Peterson (whose Scavenger Quartet included Frank Pahl - later releasing in Japan via Novel Cell Poem) knew Detroit-native Aeron. Upon arriving at the house, I found a short note from them, and it gave me a reassuring feeling, finding their handwritten note comforted us amidst tour anxieties. This reconnection led to their musical contribution to Casiotone Compilation Vol.4 on my Aotoao Label.

Then in 2015, an unexpected email arrived: Lucky Kitchen was releasing new material—a split LP featuring legends Pauline Oliveros and Zeena Parkins (!), part of a series of excavating Serralves Museum archives. Though I'd moved to Ishikawa and lost touch with urban record shops, I suggested potential Japanese distributors. While I hoped this signaled the label's revival, no further releases came, and our communication lapsed again.

And, in March 2022, following the acclaim from my 100 Keyboards performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in New York City the previous year, I set out on a four-city tour of the United States, with the final stop at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) in Portland, Oregon. To my surprise, Alejandra & Aeron came to the show! They had returned to the U.S. from Oslo a few years earlier and were now teaching at an art school in Portland.

I was so focused on performing that I didn’t notice them during the show. However, I had vaguely registered a child wearing earmuffs intently watching from the front row—this turned out to be their beloved daughter Agnes. The day after the performance, I was invited to their home. We had tea in their charming garden (where they kept bees), chatted, then decided to take a walk to a nearby taco stand.

Along the way, Agnes picked up stones and plastic objects from the roadside and proudly showed us her treasures. When Alejandra asked, “Why did you think this stone was a good one?” Agnes would examine her find and respond after careful thought— “I like how its edges are rounded” or “I like its color” In these exchanges I saw the essence of Alejandra & Aeron’s artistic practice and way of living embodied. It reminded me of their work and their approach to life, capturing beauty in the smallest details. What began as an ordinary walk became like wandering comfortably through their creative universe—it felt exactly like listening to their music, and I was deeply moved.

After the walk, they took me to their regular ice cream shop. Near the register, I noticed a scrap of paper with random scribbles—perhaps order notes or pen tests. As someone who’s collected such test scribbles for years, I was intrigued. When Aeron remarked, “This is kinda cool,” I immediately asked, “Can I take this?” He quickly negotiated with the staff, securing the paper for my collection.

After returning to Japan, I became curious about their recent activities and found their work focused on seed law. They critique multinational corporations’ push for proprietary rights and seeds patents which disrupt natural cycles of locally rooted plant life. The global homogenization and commodification of crops leads to monoculture farming of staple foods and erodes genetic diversity crucial for crops to adapt to climate change and disease—a human made disaster, they argue. Their artistic practice addresses these issues through cross-disciplinary collaborations beyond art but also manifesting in publications and exhibitions such as their project Consuming Nature.

These issues are not distant to Japan. The revised Seedling Law came into effect in 2022 granting exclusive rights to corporate breeders, restricting farmers’ traditional cultivation. Historically, crop breeding progressed through shared knowledge, rooted in regional culture. By framing this as intellectual property, the law restricts ordinary farmers’ cultivation while granting rights to a select few corporations. Alejandra & Aeron trace these histories from their origins, using their work to illuminate the impacts, relationships, and problems faced by people living within these systems today.

Though I had assumed they’d moved away from music over the past decade, this work—grounded in research on land and folk practices—resonates deeply with their musical output. In hindsight, it makes perfect sense.

Sometime later, I received an email: they had moved to Detroit. This wasn’t entirely surprising, as Aeron had mentioned in Portland that they wanted to start a new life elsewhere. But then came the unexpected news—they had made a new album and did I want to hear it? (!!)

I was stunned. Pressing play, I heard a gentle synth texture unlike anything in their past work, alongside piano and humming—and of course, their signature field recordings. At the center of it all was Agnes, her tender exchanges with Alejandra & Aeron. Just when I thought this might be a new version of their Home Tapes—piano tones emerged, followed by Aeron’s voice singing. Not the fragmented humming of field recordings, but a deliberate, composed song performed to be clearly heard. The lyrics were simple, repetitive, fleeting—blending into the album’s fabric before vanishing. As someone who loved Aeron’s monologue in The Tale of the Unhappy American, I thrilled at this new direction (more singing, please!!), though its sparse, exquisite arrangement felt quintessentially them.

The piano continued, but unlike past albums where it blended with field recordings or electronics, here it carried clear melodic intention. Concrete sounds and electronic textures were delicately woven in. Later, digitally processed tones unfolded with luminous clarity. Complex electronic arrangements demanded close listening, punctuated by Agnes’s chatter. This music felt like a celebration of their world—a fermentation of their lives over the past decade. Just as my chest swelled with emotion, Agnes whispered, "It’s too much..." in her sweet voice. They are conscious that this is music that will be listened to repeatedly by others, showing a musical side that was not present in their previous work. What is most striking is the beauty of the tone and sound that seems to be perfectly contemporary, and it makes you realize that they are musicians who are needed in the present. There was no doubt about their musical talent when I saw them perform for the first time.