Maïa Barouh - AÏDA (2022) [Hi-Res]

Maïa Barouh is a French-Japanese singer, flautist, songwriter and producer.

Her soundworld is a unique mix of traditional Japanese singing (or “Nippon Blues” as she calls it), electro, pop and rap with lyrics in French and Japanese.

Described as a “punk shaman” by the German press, she effortlessly blends elements from her musical heritage with contemporary sounds to create a distinctive marriage of both cultures. Her inimitable and idiosyncratic style comes from her ability to fuse together unexpected musical and cultural forms.

She combines her percussive and playful flute playing with a distinctive vocal timbre, partly inspired by the traditional singing technique of Amami, a southern Japanese island.

Following in the musical steps of her father, legendary chanson writer and producer Pierre Barouh, Maïa learned piano, guitar and percussion from an early age, but it was the flute that would become her main instrument of choice.

It was in the underground cabaret scene of Tokyo that she began her career aged 17, playing flute in rock groups, subsequently performing saxophone in a Japanese street brass band alongside drag queens, dancers and strip tease artistses. She would later continue her father’s legacy by curating and releasing on the label he founded (Saravah) a compilation of underground Japanese artists, as well as inviting the freshest Tokyo talent to perform in France in a show she named “Le Cabaret Shinjuku”.

She has also collaborated with African and Brazilian musicians and DJ’s, before creating her own band where singing became the key ingredient. After 11 years of touring right across the Japanese archipelago, she decided to settle in her other native land, France.

In Paris she created the album “Kodama” with the renowned produced Martin Meissonnier (Fela Kuti, Robert Plant & Jimmy Page, Khaled, Don Cherry, Manu Dibango…) and toured all around Europe for 5 years, before starting work on her brand new project “AIDA”; an album which sonically and lyrically explores her French-Japanese identity.

With a distinctive soundworld built around her two main instruments, flute and voice, “AIDA” (which means “between”) is a raw, spacious and thought-provoking album, which also manages to be playful, quirky and at times disconcerting, for example when she explores anti-Asian racism and feminism. Maia produced the album herself in collaboration with English producer MaJiKer best known for his work with French alt-pop artist Camille and the beatbox group Berywam.

Maïa is also playing and singing for a dance show of the amazing well-known contemporary dancer called “Vestige” and she composed the whole music for the theater piece “Voyage dans mon ventre”

With her extensive stage experience, quirky style, volcanic energy and limitless creativity Maïa Barouh takes us on a trip, where tribal music and electro rub shoulders with pop and rap. This is her radical approach to reinventing her roots.