walking, north, north brings together four works by the Japanese composer Makiko Nishikaze, three solo pieces and one duo, played by the ensemble L'Art pour L'Art. The disc is the result of a collaboration of many years between composer and musicians, and all four pieces are built from sound, resonance and silence rather than from melody or narrative.

Nishikaze was born in Wakayama in 1968 and works as a composer, pianist and performance artist. She studied composition with Bin Kaneda at the Aichi University of Fine Arts and Music in Nagoya, with Alvin Curran at Mills College in Oakland from 1993, when she also began to work in performance, and from 1994 with Walter Zimmermann at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, where she took her diploma in 1996 and became his master student in 1999. She received the composition prize of the city of Stuttgart in 1995, held fellowships at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in 1999 and the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles in 2003, and lives and works in Berlin. Of the players she says: "The musicians understand each sound and each musical gesture as their own language, and they are able to bring it to life."

The pieces are long and unhurried, between about eleven and twenty minutes. wind, near you, at seventeen minutes, is described as a flow made of sounds, their resonance and silence. In sanctus the air itself becomes the mediator between the player and the instrument. The title work, at almost twenty minutes the longest, is not a narrative picture of a winter landscape but again a current of sound and silence. St. Michael's garden closes the disc with a path that cannot be predicted, like entering a celestial garden that one can imagine but has never visited.

Her music has been played at the Berliner Klangwerkstatt, the Darmstadt summer courses and the Sonambiente festival in Berlin, and broadcast in Canada and Australia. She gives concerts, lectures and courses on experimental music in Germany and Japan, some of them for preschool children, and taught at Wakayama University in 2007. Her trioaurora, connected with the Villa Aurora, appears on Wergo's Berlin Meets Los Angeles in Concert.

CD, total running time 61'32", released in 2009 by artist.cd / Wergo as ARTS 8118 2.