Ryoko Akama

Born in 1976 in Sendai, Japan, she studied sound engineering in Europe between 1995 and 2004, then returned to Japan to apprentice in Nagauta, the traditional music genre associated with Kabuki and Geisha performance. Based in Huddersfield, UK, she completed a PhD in composition at Huddersfield University in 2015 under Professor Monty Adkins. Her practice centres on text scores, silence, and fragile objects — paper balloons, glass bottles — cultivating quiet temporal experiences within an aesthetics of almost nothing. She has created a series of prose scores called Code of Silence and has collaborated with Eliane Radigue, Tony Conrad, and David Toop.