10/05/2022
Hiro Kone is the alias of Nicky Mao, a New York based musician and producer. She uses a combination of hardware, synths, and modular to cultivate her sound - a visceral meditation on rhythm, noise, and melody that has seen her release on leading experimental labels including DAIS Records and BANK Records. No stranger to manipulating macabre disorientations into enchanting new shapes, her music exposes the unsettling and sublime. Instinctively responding to the precariousness of humanity, Kone’s cascades of twisted field recordings find an inherent partner in the effervescent current of synthesis and, in the process, forge new terrains.
Her most recent full length release, ‘Silvercoat the throng’ was described by Resident Advisor’s Dash Lewis, as “Beautiful and harrowing, falling apart and building anew.” The album captures Hiro Kone at the peak of their powers, alchemizing disruption and decomposition into regenerative interior worlds: “Within the darkness and absence is an opportunity for discovery.” The album features collaborations with Speaker Music (DeForrest Brown, Jr.), travis from Chicago’s ONO, and Muqata’a. Bridging neoclassical, jazz, noise and percussive elements, Hiro Kone’s world is one that unfolds and changes over time, rejecting genre for undiscovered Potential.
She has performed an array of shows across the globe and been an artist in residence at Pioneer Works in New York and the prestigious EMS studios in Stockholm. She has been a fixture at cutting-edge electronic events including Sustain-Release, Norbergfestival, and LEV Festival. Most recently she appeared at The Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme for their exhibition ‘May amnesia never kiss us on
the mouth’.
Her visit to SF has been a very long time coming and we can’t wait to hear how she fills the upstairs space at Counterpulse with sound this Friday.
