Maïa Barouh

Maia is a unique Japanese/French singer and flutist.

She sings using a special throat technique from a small island in the South of Japan, mixing it with modern and electric sounds. But the flute is her first instrument. She grew up on classical music and jazz, and transformed the way she played as she started making her own music improvising, singing with her flute and using it as a percussion. Because of her background, her childhood spent traveling and listening to live music from all around the world, her music takes us deeply into Japan but resonates sometimes with singing from Gipsy, Middle Eastern or African musical traditions.

The earthquake and the nuclear accident that hit Japan on March 11, 2011 marked a turning point in Maa's development as a musician. The man-made catastrophy and the destruction that followed pushed her to reroot herself deeply in the musical traditions of Japan, gathering the songs of fishermen, villagers, peasants in the region of Fukushima, and take them out to the wider world, in her own interpretation, as a testimony of the richness and the power of an area now reduced to rubble. 

Maa has already released a few albums in Japan and performed with artists like Cyro Baptista, Arto Lindsay, Kip Hanrahan and Yasuaki Shimizu. But this project produced by Martin Meissonnier is completely new. Now based in her second home country, France, she embarks on new adventures with her band combining music, dance and VJ.The album will be released in september 2014 in Europe.

With a powerful musicianship and an instinct unbound by national borders, Maa offers a wide musical landscape where melancholy and madness ride on percussive grooves, trance-like dance tunes and stripped down a cappella singing.

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgZPrgNoLHrM1lpui8VOpsg?feature=watch