Midori Takada

Midori Takada is a Tokyo-born percussionist and composer who trained in classical percussion before turning to her own work in the late 1970s. She was a founding member of Mkwaju Ensemble, a Japanese group playing repetitive, interlocking marimba and percussion music, and she draws on African and Asian percussion traditions as much as on Western minimalism.

Through the Looking Glass was a rarity for decades until it circulated widely online and was reissued in 2017 by the Swiss label WRWTFWW, which brought her a new, younger audience and a return to international concert stages. Her later work includes Le Renard Bleu, a collaboration with the singer Lafawndah. In performance she moves between marimba, gongs, drums and found objects, letting long patterns develop slowly.