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Aoineko Aoineko are a creative collective pumping out cutting edge art, computer graphics and music. Centred around Ben Steele, who does the art and electronics, the group's musical direction is also shaped by Aoineko's extremely foxy vocalist Sonja, its three guitarists: John, Cliff, and Garth, its two drummers: John and Jason, and bassist Christopher. Artistically, Ben is aided by his close friend Darren. They eat, sleep, and dream Aoineko.
Thanks to Sonja's hauntingly beautiful vocals, great songs and multi-textured production, the music manages to become something quite original. And that's a feat in itself these days.
The music is tightly married to the visuals, and their first project is a 30 minute CG film. The trailer can be seen on their website. Aoineko has received honors in Tokyo, Taipei, New York, Los Angeles, Spain, and Italy. Their work has been recognized and exhibited internationally by Canon across the US and Japan, and for a single, glorious day in the National Museum of Art in Rome.
 PIXELSURGEON: Give me some background about yourselves, where you grew up, education and what are you doing now?
BEN: Aoineko are all musically and artistically self-taught. Living apart, we spent the better part of a decade honing our skills and now have come together to produce. We do different kinds of work in different places. Some research and art are done in Taiwan, China, and Japan. Musical inspiration is found while travelling all over the world. The largest part of production is done in our base in the middle of the desert.
How did you meet up and what was it each other that made you decide to form a group?
Most importantly, we were all friends. The catalyst was an art project begun a few years ago called ingen. it laid a very basic framework that evolved into aoineko. We started by just asking what we needed of each of the other members and working together to create a sum greater than its parts.
How would you describe what you do?
I've heard friends describe the first project, Fragile Machine, as an electronic or modern operetta. I think that's an interesting description. There is no specific genre it fits into. There's no dialogue, it's not a movie, and yet if you watch half an hour of radiohead videos you don't find a story or layered thematic motifs. In those senses, Fragile Machine is a new way of combining computer animation and music to tell stories and express the human condition.
Do you think you're doing something new, or refining something that's already been?
Nothing creative is ever done in a void. Even Einstein had Max Planck!
So while I hope people will see a lot of new and interesting elements in our work, we certainly owe a debt to the incredibly talented artists and musicians who've inspired us at every step of our lives.
Why combine visuals and music to such an intense degree?
Because each gains power when married to the other. The visuals are a kind of intellectual content, describing what is going on, how, who, etc. Music provides the emotional frame, expressing the meaning of what's happening. If man tries to be God, how will the artificial children feel? The visuals show what happens to them, the music shows how they endure it.
 Do you play live?
Yes. However it is extremely rare, because we use a lot of projection equipment and other things like that, so finding the right venue and promoters is difficult. It is a very special project to all of us, and we will only show it in the right conditions. There are huge subsets of all of our visual work, including a lot of experimental, abstract work, and different looks into the worlds we create, that are only used in live performance settings. Other aspects to the show include interactive kiosk terminals and special prints that further explore the Aoineko creative space. Fans of the forthcoming DVD will gain all of insights into the meaning behind it all at one of our live shows. It's also really fun to explore variations in the themes of the music live. It opens up a lot of new creative places.
Who are your influences, both musical and visual?
Musically: Boards of Canada, Cornelius, Claudine Longet, Radiohead, Nobukazu Takemura, Tortoise, DJ Shadow, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Faye Wong, Leadbelly, Simon and Garfunkel, Takako Minekawa, the Notwist, Velvet Underground, FSOL, John Coltrane, Pixies, Randy Newman, Brian Eno, Gabor Szabo, Air, Kid Loco, Yoko Kanno, Henryk Gorecki, and Glenn Gould
The most influential visual artists on our work have been the directors, Akira Kurosawa, in my mind the finest ever, Orson Welles, Shinichiro Watanabe, Mamoru Oshii, Ingmar Bergman, Kaige Chen, Zhang Yimou, Chris Cunningham and Miyazaki, Web artists including Niko Stumpo and Arnaud Mercier. I used to be a big admirer of Mike Young before all his political demagoguery. I lost one of my heroes last time I checked out his site. When artists of his caliber use their position for political rants it takes away from the work. I'd appreciate it if everyone quit doing that.
Painters and illustrators including Li Jijian, Yoshitaka Amano, Moebius, Ralph McQuarrie, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, and the great works of the Italian renaissance and French rococo period.
The music sounds very organic, even though there are electronic elements. In previous instances when hi-tech visuals have been so closely married to music, it's usually been of the electronica type. Was this a conscious move on your part to move away from that or happy accident?
It was conscious. Since most of the electronic music we like best, such as Boards of Canada or Cornelius, uses a lot of real instruments as well, it seemed natural our more electronic numbers would follow suit. A lot of the members in our band also wanted to do more straightforward rock, and I thought it provided a nice balance to the visuals. I think the project seems a little less of the minute that way. I love Air's music, but if we'd done something like that with the vocoders, etc, it would've been very much an "oh, that's an early 2000s kinda work" whereas songs like Keigo, which is a rock number we did that coincides with an android factory video that may be the leadoff single, seems good any year as far as I'm concerned. People like Boards of Canada and Air made vocoders cool again in the 90s but I think they're mostly off-limits for newer bands!
I've always been impressed with the way the film "Ghost in the Shell" has aged gracefully, while other anime have become dated. I think that was because the care they took with the music, and I hope we've done the same thing.
 The singer Sonja plays an integral part of the visuals; why feature her and not the rest of the band?
Because she's hot!
We're mostly bookish, academic types, not really in front of the camera people. Sonja is too, actually. But we had to show somebody...
Sonja's image is constantly reinvented: at one point like a sad angel, at another a robot; how does this relate to the music?
Well, the robot girl in the animation wasn't originally intended to look like Sonja, but she did help with the facial design, and as she was the voice for the work, the two sort of seemed to merge over the course of production. I guess they're kindred spirits.
Sonja, to me the sound of your voice is very mysterious as clearly I don't understand the lyrics, but my wife - who is Chinese - was very interested to hear someone singing in Mandarin. Is singing in Chinese because you feel more comfortable singing like that, or do you want to convey a sense of abstraction with the music?
SONJA: I am comfortable singing in both languages [giggles]
Some of the songs will be English for the finished work, but for others, we decided that the Chinese had a more mmm... esoteric quality to it, which helped express the girl better.
What is the songwriting and visual process? Does the music come first and then the visuals, or vice versa?
BEN: They are produced in parallel. During the months of production for a video, a number of songs will be written with it in mind, then the most suited to it will be used.
 What equipment do you use?
Besides the basic musical drums/guitars/bass setup, we use the Aoineko Networked Mainframe programmed with proprietary animation and design software, called the Aoineko GL (Graphics Language) Library. The only commercial software programs we use to support our own Aoineko GL Library are Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Flash MX, and Newtek Lightwave.
How do you see the group progressing? How will you push music, art, graphics and motion together?
From where I stand today, it's a huge question. There are so many paths I'd like to take. We are going to produce a few smaller works, such as online interactive exhibits, before we attempt a spiritual successor to Fragile Machine. That next large project will probably be an entirely new story in the Aoineko universe, however I'm interested in continuing the Fragile Machine story in other media, maybe a collaborative manga or something like that. We have a new music project in the works that will be released just a few months after Fragile Machine, and there will be accompanying visuals with it that we are doing together with the french high fashion and perfume designer Thierry Mugler. He's done some of the most creative haute couture ever and I think both his fans and ours will love this collaborative project.
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