Less than a year after her passing, reckoning with the lowercase works of a masterful sound artist.

To absorb the late Sawako Kato’s work at full volume and without distraction is to embrace and revel in the here and now, the invisible blade of time between past and future that slices our reality. It’s also to enter the realm of a singular creator who once expressed a desire to achieve the impossible:

“I would like to create the 0.1-second sound which condenses all emotions in the universe. When I listen to it, maybe my mind and existence itself will collapse,” she said in a 2022 interview for the online magazine 15 Questions. Although she never achieved that milestone, the work Sawako created starting in the mid-‘00s suggest she was on the right path.

She was a thoughtful, eloquent observer. One anecdote from a lovely remembrance in The Wire involved the Quebecois sound artist France Jobin, who had been working with Sawako on a project based on quantum physics. Per The Wire’s Jez Riley French: “After sending her a text about loss and parallels, Sawako replied: 
’There is no start point, and there is no end point … just one point — now here … the coupled worlds are the same and both together. In Japanese grammar, we can skip subjects. So, sometimes the boundaries between you and me, this and that, here and there, become melting and ambiguous.’” 

Wrote French of her unexpected passing, which occurred in early 2024 “after a short illness”: “In February she was to perform at an event in Tokyo. Instead her music was played without her on stage. Known for her subtlety, most thought it intentional. A few weeks later Sawako melted through the boundaries.”

Best known for her albums for Taylor Deupree’s essential 12k Records starting in the mid-‘00s (especially 2005’s Hum), she made connections in the New York experimental scene after relocating from Tokyo to study sound at NYU. Wrote Deupree after news of her death was announced: “I met Sawako in Tokyo in 2003 and spent time with her and her music as she worked on her master’s degree in Interactive Telecommunications at New York University,” he wrote. “She returned to Tokyo to continue her music career and ultimately ended up teaching music technology and coding to young women at Ferris University in Kanagawa. I had the pleasure of releasing three of her albums on 12k, touring with her, recording with her and sharing countless meals with our close-knit musical family throughout Japan.”

“It was the time of glitch, lowercase sound and microsound (both the mailing list and the book),” Sawako said of her early years, in 15 Questions. “At the same time, I started to work at an art gallery, and the gallery manager introduced me to the works of Fluxus, Felix Hess, Steve Roden, Brandon LaBelle, Alvin Lucier and so on.”  She added of the period, “I felt that sound synthesis was something like a sci-fi garden to create a convoluted pomato (potato + tomato) or chimera of time and space.”

Her metaphorical garden included pieces like “Sweet Hygiea Glass,” “Night Leaf,” “Patchworked Blanket,” “Wind Shower Particle,” and a bounty of other poetically titled pieces. Like her modest label, Tiny Tiny Press, Sawako sought itsy utterances culled from nature and the aether and recontextualized them to conjure an aural meadow. Thumps, tweets, chirps, hisses, thumps. The sound of ocean wind hitting her microphone. Dream-state whispers. Everything. Her final studio album, Sounds, came out earlier this year. Its 18 pieces, simply numbered 1 through 18, are as precisely crafted as a pine cone and as delicate as dandelion seeds — so carefully composed that they seem ready to drift away.

Sawako was an eager collaborator and contributor. In addition to her 14 albums (per Discogs) and eight EPs — mostly available only on CD or digitally — during her lifetime she appeared on nearly four dozen compilations by labels including and/OAR, Schole, Kesh Recordings, Unseen, and more. Particularly covetable: Grain: A Compilation Of 99 Short Tracks features a 7-second untitled Sawako track that captures myriad emotions — and 98 others by artists including Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Toshimaru Nakamura, Silver Apples, and the Lothars.

All of this is to say, the work that Sawako left behind is endlessly inspiring and, if you allow it, will wend its way through your ears, shock the synapses, and a make a beeline to your heart.

In 2022, she wrote via email to The Wire’s French: ”Personally, I am interested not only in sound but other waves and frequencies – electromagnetic waves, sunlight, infrared beams, inaudible sound (for humans)… The senses and ‘ears’ of humans in the future might be able to catch the frequencies which we can’t now.” That she passed before she achieved her aim of experiencing unheard frequencies only compounds the loss.

Finally, if you want to get lost in the sounds that Sawako herself loved, she compiled a playlist for a cosmetics company called Aesop, and it’s one of the most exquisite things you’ll ever hear. Of the playlist, she wrote: “The sounds of the neotropical Amazon rainforest, the ice of the Arctic Circle and the soundscapes of various lands mingle and are processed alongside electronic sound, guitars, gamelan, bells and voices. Each sound might be something personal and ephemeral, but heard together as one, they become like the sublime flow of a river on the Earth.” We’ve embedded it below from Apple Music. It’s also available on Spotify.

Here’s Sawako’s Tumblr, where she tracked her comings and goings and offered tidbits of info.