Midori Hirano has been played over 40 times on NTS, first on 2 October 2016. Midori Hirano's music has been featured on 41 episodes.

Midori Hirano is a Berlin-based Japanese musician, composer, and sound artist originally from Kyoto. With roots in classical piano - an instrument she began studying in early childhood and later pursued at university - her work inhabits the liminal space between structure and abstraction, the acoustic and the electronic. Drawing on the tactile resonance of the piano and the ephemeral textures of field recordings, she layers delicately processed synthesis and fragmented sonics to construct intricate, emotionally charged landscapes, where analogue warmth and digital nuance dissolve into a powerful, evocative harmony.

Her second album klo:yuri (2008, noble) received critical acclaim, including praise from TIME magazine, which described her music as “at once familiar and odd, with the ineffable quality of a dream.” After relocating to Berlin later that year, she began performing extensively across Europe and developing a body of work. Her last four solo albums - Minor Planet (2016) and Invisible Island (2020), both released on Sonic Pieces, as well as Mirrors in Mirrors (2019, Daisart) and Soniscope (2021, Dauw) - helped define her distinct style: delicate, layered compositions where piano and electronics converge in striking, immersive interplay.

Under the alias MimiCof, launched in 2011, Hirano delved deeper into experimental territories - exploring rhythmic intricacies, melodic abstraction, and the tension between structure and spontaneity. Over time, this work merged more fluidly into her releases under her own name, forming a unified artistic language.

Her 2017 album Moon Synch (Alien Transistor) was born from a residency at EMS Elektronmusikstudion in Stockholm, where she explored the sonic possibilities of the Buchla analogue modular synthesizer. This was followed by Distant Symphony (2022, Karlrecords), a full-length work commissioned by the Heroines of Sound Festival and composed entirely using the rare EMS SYNTHI 100 at Electronic Studio Radio Belgrade - an immersive exploration of vintage modular synthesis and its expressive depth.

She has worked with a diverse range of artists, including string player Atsuko Hatano on Water Ladder (2021, Alien Transistor); Hprizm of Anti Pop Consortium (Love Control, 2017, raster); Lali Puna (Everything Counts On, 2017, Morr Music); and Ilpo Väisänen of Pan Sonic, with whom she has performed live. She has also been part of the pioneering female collective Monika Werkstatt led by Gudrun Gut.

Many of her solo performances are accompanied by live visuals created by the visual artist Kaliber 16 aka Markus Wambsganss.

In 2025, she released the collaborative album Split Scale(Thrill Jockey) with German brothers duo Brueder Selke. This was followed by another collaborative album, Sudden Fruit, with CoH aka Ivan Pavlov, released on Ici, d’ailleurs.

Beyond her solo and collaborative recordings, Hirano composes music for film, dance, and video installations. She recently scored two feature films: Tokito (2024) by Aki Mizutani, and Satisfaction (2025), directed by Alex Burunova and starring Emma Laird, Zar Amir Ebrahimi, and Fionn Whitehead.

She has collaborated with the artist Anne Duk Hee Jordan, composing the music for two of her short films: Auf Erden sind wir nur kurz Fabelhaft (2022) and Brakfesten / La Grande Bouffe (2022). The latter has been featured in prominent international institutions, including ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica, HEK Basel, Baltic Art Center, and Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin.

She also created music for the Kansai Osaka Expo 2025 - an ambient soundscape integrated into the open-air spaces surrounding the pavilions, subtly embedded in the architectural and cultural atmosphere of the site.

Her remix work includes music by artists such as Rival Consoles (Erased Tapes), Foam and Sand (aka Robot Koch), and Liars (Mute Records). Her latest releases span labels such as Sonic Pieces, Dauw, Alien Transistor, Karlrecords, INNI, Erased Tapes Music, Longform Editions and Thrill Jockey.

Her newest solo album OTONOMA (2026) has been released on Thrill Jockey Records. The album is a culmination of her previous work as MimiCof, combining experiments in electronics and her classical sense of harmony on the piano with the endless textural possibilities of synthesizers.

https://www.midorihirano.com/